Monthly Archives

December 2025

Blog

What Does it Mean to be “Southern”?

What does it mean to be “Southern”? This question has vexed Americans since the founding. Every American knew that sectional differences existed. George Mason, for example, worried that the “Eastern States” would plunder the agricultural States further south. He drafted an amendment that would have prevented “navigation laws,” i.e. protective tariffs, for that reason. Gouverneur Morris openly suggested that if…
Brion McClanahan
December 30, 2025
Blog

An Ode to the Magnificent Memory of CSA General Robert E. Lee

A noble son of Old Virginia, of which she ought to be always purely proud and say she knew, Was the ever honorable cavalier by the notable name of Robert E. Lee who decided to, Resist Northern tyranny, by fighting/or states' rights, native land. and to ably assure and see, That the Southern people might remain free, if only the…
Joseph A. Settanni
December 29, 2025
Blog

Eggnog Nationalism

Originally published at Folk Chain of Memory. Winter often brought reprieve in the wars of the past, but not in the Eggnog War. Unlike the fashionable moral ambiguities peddled by our gender-ambiguous storytellers, this war permits no compromise. Here we find no fashionable shades of gray. We’re not flipping houses. The Eggnog Question divides as clearly as foundations, rock against…
Chase Steely
December 24, 2025
Blog

Liberty and the Plow: Defending Our Rights Against Federal Overreach

Originally published at Medium.com By Agricola, a Freeholder of the Republic “Liberty is preserved not by distant power, but by limits placed upon it.” As a third generation agrarian in the Western United States, I inherit not only the soil worked by my family but also the principles they instilled in me — chief among them, the sanctity of private…
Darcy Lammers
December 23, 2025
Blog

A Vaudeville of Devils

This piece was originally published at A Memoir of the Occupation. (Wars in the age of mass democracy are waged over ideas, a wise man once said (maybe Collingwood, though I can’t find the quote). So, yes: I’m happy to grant that slavery was a cause of the War Between the States. Or, rather, the portrait of slavery conjured by…
Enoch Cade
December 22, 2025
Blog

The Matrix, MAGA, and the Southern Tradition

As with many technological developments in American history, such as the internet itself, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being introduced with little occasion for the populace to be informed as to its potential impact or any opportunity for them to weigh in with their concerns.  Such is life in the Republic of Technology, aka The Machine.  Rather, the entire debate is…
Mike Goodloe
December 19, 2025
Blog

The Forgotten Voyagers

In the shadowed corners of American history lies a story rarely told, a narrative of colonists who crossed an ocean twice to forge communities in the swamps and plains of the Deep South. These were the Isleños, a people whose very name whispers of distant shores and forgotten tongues. The Spanish word for "Islander" would come to identify an entire…
Jose Nino
December 18, 2025
Blog

Not Gone–Just Blowing with the Wind

In the movie Gone with the Wind, just after the credits were presented there was a forward line as follows: “There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the old south. Here in this pretty land gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last to be seen of knights and their ladies fair; of master and of…
Paul H. Yarbrough
December 17, 2025
Blog

Same Old, Same Old

A review of Against the Machine: on the Unmaking of Humanity (Thesis, 2025) by Paul Kingsnorth In an interview included in the press handout for Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth is asked why he wrote this book now.  Good question. “The rise and triumph of the Machine,” he says, “is becoming increasingly obvious in the 2020s, so the moment seems…
Kirkpatrick Sale
December 16, 2025
Blog

Modern Yankees Use the Historical Propaganda Model Created by the Soviet Communists

It is verboten in most places across the United States to say anything favorable about Southerner leaders who either personally embodied or fought to defend – with pen, sword, or by political means – authentic Southern tradition.  The institutions of the Left (media, academy, Hollywood) and the Right (talk radio, governments of Red States and counties/parishes, Fox News) seem to…
Walt Garlington
December 15, 2025
Blog

Crossing the Rubicon

Originally published at the Alabama Gazette. Crossing the Rubicon, a common phrase used to describe a point of no return, is typically traced back to Julius Caesar’s crossing of the river Rubicon in January 49 BC, initiating the Roman Civil War. An analogy can be drawn between the actions of Caesar and those of Lincoln in his call for 75,000…
John M. Taylor
December 12, 2025
Blog

A Few Southern Reflections

Originally published at Reckonin.com. Before the War for Southern Independence the main theme of American government was republican virtue and honour. The defeat of the Confederacy established a new main theme - making money. That was the most important result of the War. Compare Lee and Grant. Or the real characters of Jeff Davis and the corporate lawyer and tricky…
Clyde Wilson
December 11, 2025
Blog

The Confederates Who Chose Brazil

They sailed into Brazil more through memory than fact now, not as tourists or traders but as refugees from a vanquished republic. Between 1865 and 1875, an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 former Confederates left the wreckage of the American South and started over in the Empire of Brazil. Their exodus counted among the largest political departures of United States citizens…
Jose Nino
December 10, 2025
Blog

History Is Not a Science

Originally published at Mises.org. The court historians, who insist that they have the only “correct” view of history, like to claim that theirs is the only true version of history because it is based on primary sources. But they fail to distinguish between what the primary sources state, and their own interpretation of the significance to be attached to those…
Wanjiru Njoya
December 9, 2025
Blog

The Conspiracy No One is Talking About

Originally published at From the Desk of Jon Harris. I recently recorded a podcast on John Taylor of Caroline’s important but often neglected book New Views of the Constitution (1823). I initially believed that the most compelling way to introduce this work to modern audiences would be to highlight how Taylor, writing from a federalist perspective, disagreed with Joseph Story’s…
Jonathan Harris
December 8, 2025
Blog

Jefferson and the Indians

Jefferson’s views on Indians were characterized by ambivalence. Jefferson both loved and hated Native Americans at times because he de profundis animi (from the depths of his soul) loved Native Americans. That is not posited as a thesis, for it should be obvious to anyone who examines Jefferson’s presidential writings on Native Americans, but as an observation. Jefferson was, through…
M. Andrew Holowchak
December 5, 2025
Blog

Weaver’s Lessons for the Modern Right

First published at The Daily Economy. The modern American right could stand to gain from the insight of Richard M. Weaver. Weaver, a twentieth-century conservative of the Southern tradition, perceived the dangers of radical ideologies as well as the extent to which American thinking offered the viable alternative. Amid the disagreements and controversies of our present moment, today’s various libertarians,…
Justin Madura
December 4, 2025
Blog

Commander-in-Chief and Journalistic “Wisdom”

I feel saddened (actually just mystified) at the accepted notion that the president is elected as commander-in-chief of the country. Somehow the sages of journalism have interpreted, as a result of some extracurricular activities of various presidents over the years, that because the term CIC is present in Article 2 and since the president’s duties fall under this same article,…
Paul H. Yarbrough
December 3, 2025
Blog

Rethinking the Southern Tradition

Nullification is in the news, but not because the American right considers it to be a viable response to federal overreach. Mainstream conservatives have decided that classifying their leftist opponents as “neo-Confederates” interested in nullification will win political points at the next election. Victor Davis Hanson makes this a central theme of his ongoing attack on the Democratic Party. You…
Abbeville Institute
December 2, 2025
Blog

A Short History of the South, Part 4

Originally published at Reckonin.com “Reconstruction,” 1865-1877 Through most of the 20th century, American historians of every stripe (except Communists) agreed that “Reconstruction” was an ugly period in our history - a regime of corruption, tyranny, bad leadership, and dangerous deviation from American principles. Honest historians found a vast treasury of evidence for this interpretation that is available but now ignored.…
Clyde Wilson
December 1, 2025