Monthly Archives

June 2020

Blog

The Deep Identity of the South

Editor's Note: The Abbeville Institute does not endorse or support the views of Alexander Dugin on race, religion, or government, and Mr. Garlington offers his philosophical positions on identity in the broad concept of the term. The Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin lists three kinds of identity in his book Eurasian Mission – diffused, extreme, and deep.  The diffused identity is…
Walt Garlington
June 30, 2020
Blog

The Problem With Lincoln

“The problem with Lincoln is the problem with America,” said my friend Clyde Wilson when I asked him for a blurb for my new book, The Problem with Lincoln (Regnery, 2020).  That in fact is the theme of the book, written seventeen years after my first book on the subject, The Real Lincoln (TRL), as I shall explain.  A secondary…
Thomas DiLorenzo
June 29, 2020
Blog

“Let the Rioters do their Worst; I won’t Stand in Their way!”

Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina comes across as a nice man, well-mannered, calm, the kind of man you would want as a neighbor and, yes, as a friend. He seems unthreatening in how he speaks, always with a very slight but perceptible eastern North Carolina accent.  In short, he radiates a down home “you can trust me” charm. Except…
Boyd Cathey
June 25, 2020
Blog

Tucker and the Confederacy

Tucker Carlson, a man who had revealed himself as a reliable reporter/journalist over the years, in my opinion, stumbled recently. His nightly show, like most, has been confronted with the contemporary left-wing anarchic news happenings. Anarchy brings with it, anarchic news.  By its very nature, bestial conduct becomes the news story of the moment(s). And for the most part fake…
Paul H. Yarbrough
June 24, 2020
Blog

A Voice of Reason

Today, as it was a hundred and sixty years ago, America stands on the edge of an ever-widening chasm of cultural, ideological, political, racial and sectional divisions.  In 1860, there was at least one prominent voice of reason that cried out to end the nation’s mad rush into the abyss, that of Charles Mason of Iowa.  Mason was a Northern…
John Marquardt
June 23, 2020
Blog

The Shame of Bentonville

Bentonville is the lovely little town in Northwest Arkansas that I have spent nearly my entire life in. At the heart of Bentonville, in the center of our town square, there has rested a Confederate monument for the last 112 years, honoring the Southern soldiers who, carrying on the spirit of their Revolutionary fathers and grandfathers, gave their lives for…
Neil Kumar
June 22, 2020
Podcast

Podcast Episode 220

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 15-19, 2020 Topics: Political Correctness, Confederate Symbols, Reconciliation https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-220
Brion McClanahan
June 20, 2020
Blog

Calming the Rage

I am desperately trying to sooth a despaired and troubled heart.  What’s the source of my despair?  The stuck record that is playing in my mind, repeating this question.  How do we help our fellow citizens to understand that we cannot make sweeping changes and decisions in our society while being caught up in a blinding fog of emotional rage? …
Barbara Marthal
June 19, 2020
Blog

Rewriting the History of “Calhoun University.”

On June 13, 2020, Clemson University president Jim Clements proclaimed, “this was an important day for Clemson-a historic day for Clemson.”  Nothing could be further from the truth.  It was but another victory for historical revisionists and “presentism.”    On the day before, University Trustees voted 13-0 to remove John C. Calhoun’s name from the University’s Honors College because he…
Andrew P. Calhoun
June 18, 2020
Blog

Virginia Liars, Locusts, and Native Sons

Like locusts eating out the sustenance of farmers and agrarians, the once-proud land called Virginia is in philosophical and spiritual rot. The disease that is the deep state, progressivism, liberalism, Antifa, Blacks Lives Matter (because others don't?); or any of the other dogmatic, villainous human species swimming in their own waste, has spread like the black plague of Europe. Pitiful…
Paul H. Yarbrough
June 17, 2020
Blog

An Interview with Clyde Wilson, Part III

“Southerners who still value their heritage but don’t know what to do about it in such a hostile environment. They are our audience.” DM: What is your best short answer to people who say the War for Southern Independence was all about slavery and nothing but slavery? Should we come at this from an offensive posture, rather than being defensive,…
Clyde Wilson
June 16, 2020
Blog

Those Cowardly Tigers

In a gosh attempt at virtue signaling, the Clemson University Board of Trustees has unanimously voted to remove John C. Calhoun's name from the school’s Honors College. This decision came after former Tiger football stars Deshaun Watson and DeAndre Hopkins joined a petition campaign which declared: “To maintain the name is to convey Clemson University's continued indifference toward a history…
William J. Watkins
June 15, 2020
Podcast

Podcast Episode 219

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute, June 8-12, 2020 Topics: Southern tradition, political correctness https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-219
Brion McClanahan
June 13, 2020
Blog

Old Virginia Weeps

Last week Governor Ralph Northam announced his plan to remove the iconic statue of Robert E. Lee from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. This step will be the beginning of an ambitious leftist Taliban undertaking that calls for the removal of four other statues of Confederate heroes, including that of Jefferson Davis. The now endangered statues have long been beloved…
Paul Gottfried
June 12, 2020
Blog

Southern Poets and Poems, Part IX

A series by Clyde Wilson EDWARD COOTE PINKNEY (1802-1828) of Maryland was born and partly raised in England where his father, William Pinkney, was the U.S. Minister.  After publishing a good deal of poetry, he attempted to join the Mexican Navy during that country’s war of independence. From this venture Pinkney returned home to Baltimore, his health shattered.  He continued…
Clyde Wilson
June 11, 2020
Blog

Agents of the World-Spirit

The Great Men of History: What part do the so-called “Great Men of history” play in history and cultural evolution? The answer is double-edged, for it requires an understanding of the distinction between the temporal process of “history” (“a chronological series of events each of which is unique”) and the temporal-formal process of “evolution” (“a series of events in which…
H.V. Traywick, Jr.
June 10, 2020
Blog

Defund Academia, Not the Police

Since 1960, the racist identity politics of the left has politicized and degraded American history in academia and the news media. One of the problems with academia is that, in a metaphorical sense, it is inbred. It is so liberal, the 33 wealthiest colleges in the last election gave Hillary Clinton $1,560,000. They gave Donald Trump $3,000. Over 90% of…
Gene Kizer, Jr.
June 9, 2020
Blog

An Interview with Clyde Wilson, Part II

I hope you all enjoyed Part 1 of my interview with Dr. Clyde Wilson. In this installment, the Carolina lion talks about his years in Chapel Hill, decimates modern higher “education,” explains his journalistic background, discusses his seminal academic work, gives Calhoun his due, and even offers some advice to today’s students. DM: Was your bachelor’s degree in journalism? And…
Dissident Mama
June 8, 2020
Podcast

Podcast Episode 218

The Week in Review at the Abbeville Institute June 1-5, 2020 Topics: Southern tradition, Southern symbols, Political Correctness https://soundcloud.com/the-abbeville-institute/episode-218
Brion McClanahan
June 6, 2020
Blog

Emancipate This!

A Japanese neighbor of ours in Tokyo, a former university professor, has written a number of books on American and Western humor, with some of his material covering the witticisms of Abraham Lincoln.  One such example was drawn from an 1858 Illinois debate with Senator Stephen Douglas in which Lincoln attempted to deflect Douglas’ charge that he was two-faced by…
John Marquardt
June 5, 2020
Blog

God’s Country Shall Not Be Damned

In Memory of Dr. Neil Compton, Arkansas Hero, 1912-1999 Neil Compton of Bentonville, Arkansas, my beloved hometown, stands as a paragon of civic virtue. Born in Falling Springs, western Benton County, he lived with his family on Upper Coon Creek until the age of eleven, when he moved to Bentonville upon the election of his father, David, as Benton County…
Neil Kumar
June 4, 2020
Blog

American Girondins

Who should Americans blame for the iconoclasm on display during the "protests" in virtually every American city this past weekend? Not the Left. They are the easy targets, and not without culpability. The washed up hippies teaching in American classrooms at every level have certainly been a major component of the cultural Marxism that now saturates American society. But they…
Brion McClanahan
June 3, 2020
Blog

The Egalitarian Myth and Secession

Increasingly, I try to avoid news-binging, watching assiduously all the compiled, feculent bilge that passes for news reporting these days, those authorized “stories” fed to us like tasteless, industrial-strength pablum to non-rational infants, or more, to non compos mentis inmates of the giant asylum which is what our country is quickly becoming. Viewing just a few minutes of Fox’s coverage…
Boyd Cathey
June 2, 2020
Blog

An Interview with Clyde Wilson, Part I

I first met Dr. Clyde Wilson in February 2018 at an Abbeville Institute conference in Charleston. I had been reading his many works since I began becoming more intellectually curious about Southern tradition, the War, Reconstruction, and the New South, my own Confederate ancestry, and what it all means for the world today. Once you crack the veneer of the…
Dissident Mama
June 1, 2020