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Boyd Cathey

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The University of the Southern Cause

The Confederacy and Naples Some years ago (summer 1974) when I was completing a doctorate in history and political science in Europe, I made a journey south from Rome to the Italian city of Naples. Earlier, before traveling to Europe on a Richard Weaver Fellowship, I had managed to read two engrossing volumes on the Bourbon monarchy of the Kingdom…
Boyd Cathey
February 27, 2023
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MLK, Russell Kirk, and the Ignominy of Modern Conservatism

For the past forty 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…
Boyd Cathey
January 16, 2023
BlogReview Posts

The Confederate Navy

A review of Roster of North Carolinians in Confederate Naval Service: Confederate States Navy & Marne Corps (Scuppernong Press, 2021) Compiled and edited by Lt. Colonel (Ret.) Sion H. Harrington III. The monumental series, North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, began during the “Civil War” Centennial in 1961, under the direction of Dr. Louis Manarin, and has continued until recently,…
Boyd Cathey
July 12, 2022
Blog

The Stupid Party Betrays the South…Again

It did not dawn on me until I walked out to my mailbox Monday, June 20…and there was no mail. “What’s up?” I thought. “It’s Monday, and I always get mail on Monday, since it piles up on Sunday when there is no delivery.” What had happened, I wondered. Then, I witnessed one of those special delivery postal agents who…
Boyd Cathey
June 24, 2022
Blog

Remembering Gods and Generals

Lest we forget, it has been nineteen years since the film “Gods and Generals” was released to screens across the United States—to be exact, on February 21, 2003—almost ten years after the release of the blockbuster film, “Gettysburg.” “Gods and Generals” was based on the historical novel by Jeff Shaara, while “Gettysburg” was based on a work by his father,…
Boyd Cathey
June 9, 2022
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Recommended Books about the South and Its History

A friend recently asked me for a list of good books about the South and “the Late Unpleasantness” which he could share with his two sons, one of whom will be entering college this fall, and the other who will be a high school senior. I began naming some volumes, at random. But my friend stopped me in mid-sentence and…
Boyd Cathey
May 31, 2022
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“National Unity” is a Mirage

Now, after what may have been a racially-motivated mass shooting in Buffalo (May 14) by a deranged young man, new insistent calls go out for the government to fight “white nationalism” and “right wing domestic terrorism.” Attorney General Merrick Garland has already signaled more than once that this is the nation’s major challenge—not the illegal drugs epidemic, not the rampant…
Boyd Cathey
May 17, 2022
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Abraham Lincoln and the Ghost of Karl Marx

  Back in early 1981 the brilliant Southern scholar and traditionalist, Professor Mel Bradford, was the leading contender to receive President Ronald Reagan’s nomination as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bradford was the epitome of the accomplished and erudite academician, yet his deep-rooted Southern and pro-Confederate beliefs disqualified him in the eyes of many national “conservatives” such…
Boyd Cathey
March 14, 2022
Blog

Adventures in Southern and Confederate Cinema

  Recently a friend of mine asked me to list my ten favorite films about the South and the War Between the States, and to discuss the reasons I would choose them. I had written several columns in the past about cinema that favorably portrayed the Southland and had dealt fairly with the War Between the States, including, most recently,…
Boyd Cathey
February 14, 2022
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Martin Luther King Day and the Destruction of the American Republic

As is my custom, each year for the Federal holiday celebrating Martin Luther King (whose birth date in January 15), I send out a cautionary essay I first began researching back in 2018. What I was attempting to do was urgently remind readers, specifically so-called “conservatives,” that King and his holiday are emblematic of the ongoing radical transformation of the…
Boyd Cathey
January 17, 2022
Blog

When Hollywood Rode Right

Although Hollywood is now considered a monolithic bastion of leftist and “woke” political and cultural sentiment with almost no dissent tolerated, it was not always that way, at least not to the degree that exists today. Go back sixty years ago, and that progressivist uniformity was not as apparent. Certainly, “Tinseltown” was never a haven for conservative and traditionalist cinema,…
Boyd Cathey
December 10, 2021
Blog

Thanksgiving 2021

The Thanksgiving holiday always puts me in mind of the history of this country from its hopeful beginnings as thirteen separate colonies, through its tortured periods of strife and conflict, until our own day when the very existence of the Framers’ design seems to be coming apart at the seams. Yet, we still have hope, and we still celebrate our…
Boyd Cathey
November 29, 2021
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The Devils in the Demonstrators

  I was chairman of the Annual Confederate Flag Day at the North Carolina State Capitol in March of 2019 when our commemoration was besieged by several hundred screaming, raging demonstrators—Antifa-types and others. It took a mammoth police escort for us to exit the surrounded Capitol building. I clearly recall the disfigured countenance, the flaming eyes, the foul imprecations of one of…
Boyd Cathey
November 12, 2021
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Why Do They Hate The South?

Dr. Paul Gottfried's speech at the annual Confederate Flag Day commemoration in the historic 1840 North Carolina State Capitol House of Representatives chamber on March 3, 2007 is remarkably prescient and topical for us today. Much history has passed in the last fourteen years, much of it very damaging and destructive of those Southern and Confederate traditions and inheritance we…
Boyd Cathey
November 5, 2021
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Our Solemn Task as Southerners

  Over the past several years I have been writing essays for several publications and media outlets regarding Southern and Confederate history and heritage, and, in particular, about the growing assault on the symbols of that history and heritage. None of what I wrote—nothing I put into print—should have seemed that unusual or radical. My thoughts and observations could have…
Boyd Cathey
October 18, 2021
Blog

White Rice is Racist

The latest major study issued by a blue-ribbon commission on racism infecting American culture comes on the heels of other startling examples which “woke” academia, government and the media have pinpointed during this past year. Indeed, in recent months we have witnessed the Oregon Department of Education explain how traditional mathematics—you know the  2 + 2 = 4 version—is racist and unfairly…
Boyd Cathey
October 5, 2021
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The National Archives Labels the Constitution “Racist”

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all it was completely logical, the inevitable result of the insane “woke” political correctness that has been building and raging, largely unabated, in the United States now for years. Indeed, in my regular columns and essays I have been writing that this insanity, spread and imposed like a highly contagious and fatal…
Boyd Cathey
September 29, 2021
Blog

The Unwanted Southern Conservatives

  No discussion of Southern conservatism, its history and its relationship to what is termed broadly the “American conservative movement” would be complete without an examination of events that have transpired over the past fifty or so years and the pivotal role of the powerful intellectual current known as neoconservatism. From the 1950s into the 1980s Southerners who defended the…
Boyd Cathey
September 7, 2021
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Can the South Rise Again?

Growing up in mostly-rural North Carolina, most of my friends and especially their parents could go on a bit about their family backgrounds, about their familial histories. Most of my friends—like me—had great-grandfathers or great-great-grandfathers who had served in Confederate ranks back in 1861-1865. Pride in family and in our ancestors was taken for granted, a devout appreciation we all…
Boyd Cathey
August 16, 2021
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The End of America?

I have a good friend who continually asks me what I think are the prospects for sensible, conservative—that is, normal—folks in these parlous times, what I think will happen to these United States, and particularly, what will happen to the South. In response to his questioning, I can’t give a satisfactory answer, at least one nicely tied-up and tidy like…
Boyd Cathey
August 2, 2021
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How Southerners Committed Cultural and Political Suicide

Many Southerners are familiar with James “Ron” Kennedy and his brother, Walter “Donnie” Kennedy, who are prolific writers and staunch defenders of (what is left of) Southern tradition and heritage. Among the titles of their books are, most notably: The South Was Right! (newly revised edition 2020),  Punished With Poverty: The Suffering South, and  Yankee Empire: Aggressive Abroad and Despotic…
Boyd Cathey
July 19, 2021
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Independence Day and the Preservation of History

July 4, “Independence Day,” has become for most Americans little more than another holiday, a day off from work, and a time to barbecue with family and friends. Yet, the Declaration of Independence and the day we set aside to commemorate it should make us reflect on the sacrifices of the men who signed it and what they intended. Representatives from…
Boyd Cathey
July 5, 2021
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When Bing Crosby Sang Dixie

In past columns I have written about some classic films, some of which have been effectively banned or “cancelled” by our contemporary cultural gatekeepers. The case of the immortal Disney hit, “Song of the South,” is perhaps the most egregious. I wrote about it back in July 2019 in an essay published by The Abbeville Institute, also describing a seller who made…
Boyd Cathey
June 30, 2021
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Defending the West Against the Barbarians

Sometimes readers will ask me: “Why did you write on that? What were you trying to say?” My response has always been that just about everything I attempt to convey, to write, is in some way connected to and comes under a broad heading of “the defense of Western Christian civilization and culture.” Thus, everything, from my staunch defense of Confederate…
Boyd Cathey
June 17, 2021
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Abraham Lincoln and the Misinterpretation of American History

The Federalist online magazine has a problem. It’s a condition that characterizes and infects almost the entirety of the present national conservative media. This hit home for me on May 31, in an essay by Leslie McAdoo Gordon. Founded in 2013 by Ben Domenech, thefederalist.com it is not connected to The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, which…
Boyd Cathey
June 9, 2021
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“Aggressive Abroad and Despotic at Home”

Seventy-six years ago, on May 8, 1945, at 2301 hours, Central European Time, World War II in Europe officially ended. Although the war would continue in the Pacific Theatre for several more months, May 8 marked the dramatic end of what was certainly the most horrific and disastrous land war in history. European culture was changed irrevocably. A civilization which…
Boyd Cathey
May 25, 2021
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The Disappearance of Southern Conservatism

Abraham Lincoln has become, for most mainline conservatives, an icon, and, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., no opportunity is lost—it seems—on Fox News or in the establishment “conservative press,” to stress just how much conservatively-minded Americans owe to these two canonized martyrs. Any demurer, any dissent or disagreement, brings forth condemnations of the complainant as a “racist” or “reactionary,”…
Boyd Cathey
May 3, 2021
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Equality is NOT America’s Founding Principle

Our “conservative” punditry go forth daily in what seems increasingly to be an already lost battle against the agenda of the left and its progressivist minions in and outside the Biden administration. That agenda enjoys overwhelming support in hysterically “woke” academia and counts on unwavering backing from cheerleaders and mouthpieces in the establishment media, entertainment, and the sports industry. Increasingly,…
Boyd Cathey
April 19, 2021
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Firetrail

For some time now I have had a passion for classic films, in particular those films that portray sympathetically and with historical accuracy the Southland, and, more particularly, events of the War Between the States. I can remember going to the old Village Theater in Raleigh and, with my parents, seeing a re-screening of “Gone With the Wind.” And around…
Boyd Cathey
March 17, 2021
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What 2020 Means for Southerners

During the past couple of months, from shortly after the presidential election until now, seven installments in the MY CORNER series have been picked up and (re)published, and while most of these dealt specifically with the election, an emphasis on the South and the vicious attacks upon it were never far from my thoughts. To forthrightly and openly defend Southern,…
Boyd Cathey
January 4, 2021
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The Future of Fox News and the Future of America

It happened on Saturday morning, November 14, 2020, at around 8:15 EST. I had switched over to briefly catch some national news on the Fox News Channel. All of a sudden I heard—and saw—Pete Hegseth stop in the middle of the sentence he was reading from his teleprompter: “…there weren’t any substantiated cases of voter fraud in the swing states….”…
Boyd Cathey
November 18, 2020
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Is Separation the Answer?

As of Friday, November 6, the votes are still being counted in at least six states. The large pro-Trump margins that seemed to prevail late election night have now disappeared as mail in votes, many of doubtful legality have begun to trickle in. Large Democratically-controlled cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta have miraculously produced tranches of almost completely Biden votes—legal…
Boyd Cathey
November 9, 2020
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The Polls, Donald Trump, and Secession

Far too many pundits and commentators live and die by polls. It seems that each day some on-air talking head or online spinmeister reveals breathlessly increasingly bad results for President Trump and anyone who dares to support him or intends to vote for him. Consider the following headlines blasted out recently by television news: “The President has now slipped again…
Boyd Cathey
October 19, 2020
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Sampson County and the Defense of Western Civilization

Sampson County is a large, mostly rural county in southeastern North Carolina. Like most non-metropolitan areas of the state, it tends to be conservative, in fact, a long-time bastion of the modern Republican Party in a sea of traditionally Democratic-voting counties. But Sampson County illustrates what is occurring all over the Southland. And in microcosm in certain ways it symbolizes…
Boyd Cathey
September 30, 2020
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Cancel Culture Comes South

These violent times in which we live are in some ways unparalleled. For Southerners we have seen monuments memorializing and honoring our past heroes and history—monuments and symbols which have stood for a century—torn down and smashed by frenzied mobs, unrestrained in too many cases by a compliant or spineless government. Various writers and commentators have attempted to describe the…
Boyd Cathey
September 10, 2020
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Cancel Culture Comes to Wake Forest, North Carolina

Photo by Martin Fried I have written previously about the very real dangers of what is called “cancel culture.” Indeed, what we have—what we see and experience today in the United States—is a massive attempt, increasingly successful, to not just inhibit the rights of more conservative and right-leaning citizens from expressing their views, but to “doxx” them, get them fired…
Boyd Cathey
August 24, 2020
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Cancel Culture Will Decimate Us–If We Let It

Often as I work at my computer I keep on the Sirius FM Classical Music Service, “Symphony Hall,” with an occasional switch-over to a Bluegrass channel. Both, I believe, reflect at their finest superior elements of our Western cultural tradition with deep popular roots in our civilization, in the songs and compositions of people—our ancestors—which are inspired by their faith,…
Boyd Cathey
July 15, 2020
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“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
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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
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Every Southerner Needs This Magazine

On various occasions I’ve made references to Chronicles Magazine and cited articles printed in it. Remarkably, Chronicles is the only print magazine of stature (it is also online) in America which has represented and aired traditionalist conservative viewpoints, in depth and intelligently, now for forty-four years. Edited by Dr. Paul Gottfried (Raffensperger Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, Elizabethtown College), the magazine includes some of the finest writers…
Boyd Cathey
April 22, 2020
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Never Trumpers Like Joe Biden and Hate the South

Thoughtful Southerners of a conservative and traditional bent have known since the 1980s that the old Conservative Movement which began back in the 1950s with the publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, and then with the inauguration of William F. Buckley’s National Review, has no room for them, no room for their writers (unless those authors pass a rigorous…
Boyd Cathey
April 2, 2020
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Silent Sam and Inconvenient History

All across the Southland today efforts have been mounted by “woke” social justice warriors—in most cases spearheaded by violent and destructive mobs composed of radicalized Millennials—to tear down or at least remove all monuments to Confederate veterans. But removing monuments to those who fought and died in 1861-1865 is just a first step in a broad national effort, a national…
Boyd Cathey
February 3, 2020
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As the Year 2020 Begins–Southerners Take Stock

As 2020 commences it is perhaps appropriate that we take stock—that we take a look globally at just where we are, politically, culturally, religiously. All our basic and fundamental social institutions are under tremendous stress, if not outright attack, not just legally and politically, but far more insidiously, in how they are defined and how they affect us. Our very…
Boyd Cathey
January 13, 2020
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Steel Creek Church and the Airport

Early this past summer the historic Steele Creek Presbyterian Church, near the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, closed its doors for good. The church, the second oldest in Mecklenburg County, having been founded in 1760—nearly 259 years ago—by hardy Scots settlers to the region, merged with another Presbyterian Church in the area, Pleasant Hill. The classic 1889 Gothic-revival style brick structure…
Boyd Cathey
December 2, 2019
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What the Historic South has to Teach America

Many present-day Southerners—indeed, many of those Americans who call themselves “conservatives”—find it difficult to envisage a time when Southern and Confederate traditions (not to mention noble Confederate veterans like “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee) were acknowledged with honor and great respect. Today it would seem so-called “conservative media” (in particular Fox News and the radio talksters) and Republican politicians…
Boyd Cathey
November 14, 2019
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What Jefferson Davis Would Tell Us Today (And Why It Matters)

In our turbulent times it is increasingly evident that our government is disconnected to the citizens of the republic. Rather, what we behold is a zealous managerial class, an elite buried deep in an aggressive bureaucracy which is, essentially, a “government within a government.” It is an unelected, self-perpetuating oligarchy that offers the illusion of popular participation, and the chimerical…
Boyd Cathey
October 28, 2019
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How the Neocons are Helping Destroy Western Civilization

Every now and then an acquaintance who reads what I write will ask me: “Boyd, why are you so critical of writers and commentators—Neoconservatives—like Victor Davis Hanson, Ben Shapiro, Brian Kilmeade, and those who appear on Fox News? Why do you seem so condemnatory of articles and essays that show up in, say, National Review or The Wall Street Journal?…
Boyd Cathey
October 4, 2019
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The Defense of Southern History

From late 1983 until its fitful demise in the early 2000s, I served as a contributing editor, adviser, or just simply a contributor to the old Southern Partisan magazine. Although a last issue came out in 2009, the quarterly had pretty much ceased regular publication a few years before that, largely due to internecine South Carolina politics and personalities. The…
Boyd Cathey
September 18, 2019
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The Revolt Against Christian Civilization: The Southern View

Southerners, of all Americans, have been the most acute and the most persistent in their analyses of what has ailed and threatened our culture, certainly since the end of the War for Southern Independence. Only consider a Robert Lewis Dabney or an Albert Bledsoe in the years immediately after that conflict. Then, more recently, recall the Southern Agrarians centered in…
Boyd Cathey
September 9, 2019
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Is Political Separation in Our Future?

In a recent column, “Nationalism vs. Secession: Should America Break Up? (July 27), I included references to an essay I had published at THE UNZ REVIEW (July 26), and then which was picked up nationally by a number of other Web magazines, including LewRockwell (July 29) and The Abbeville Institute (August 2). For that essay “Nationalism vs. Secession,” I added…
Boyd Cathey
August 19, 2019
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Is it Time for America to Break Apart?

There is a question that increasingly arises, uncomfortably, in our conversations…from brief exchanges at work at the water cooler, at home with family, after church on Sunday, with our email messages to friends and associates. To watch any amount of television news these days, to switch back and forth between, say, CNN and Fox, and to listen to their interpretations…
Boyd Cathey
August 2, 2019
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Song of the South and the Assault on Culture

Most of us, even the youngest, have heard of the magnificent Disney film, “Song of the South,” originally released in 1946. And certainly we are familiar with its hit song, “Zip-a Dee Doo Dah.”  Some of us have seen this partially animated classic, or recall seeing it years ago, even though it is officially unavailable at present. Disney refuses to…
Boyd Cathey
July 25, 2019
Review Posts

Dabney on Fire

A review of Dabney on Fire: A Theology of Parenting, Education, Feminism, and Government (2019) by Zachary Garris, ed. During his lifetime, Southern theologian and writer Robert Lewis Dabney was most notably known for his 1866 biography of General “Stonewall” Jackson (The Life and Campaigns of Lieut.-Gen. Thomas J. Jackson) and for his post-war apologia for the Southern cause, A…
Boyd Cathey
June 25, 2019
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Remembering Real Southern Statesmen

Over the years I have known a few—very few—politicians whom I have admired greatly. It seems that the age of those remarkable statesmen and political leaders who once gave substance and guidance to this nation and to our states has passed for good. Think of it: during the first half century of the existence of the old American Republic we…
Boyd Cathey
June 5, 2019
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The Death of a Christian “Knight Without Fear”–RIP Aaron Wolf

A week ago Sunday—Easter Sunday, April 21—Aaron D. Wolf, Executive Editor of Chronicles Magazine, passed away. After what had been for him, his wife Lorrie, and his family one of the best weeks of his life, he was struck down on the Day of Resurrection by a sudden and massive heart attack: Our Lord had called Aaron unto Him. I…
Boyd Cathey
May 1, 2019
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Critical Race Theory and the Verdict of R.L. Dabney

Back last year an OpEd piece showed up in The News & Observer by one Professor John Biewen, who is Audio Program Director at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. In his essay Biewen explained: “White supremacy today is not mainly about the guys with Tiki torches. It’s about power, and systemic patterns of…
Boyd Cathey
April 15, 2019
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The Leftist Long March, “Silent Sam,” and the REAL Question

Most every Thursday I gather with a group of friends for lunch at some restaurant in Raleigh. Among the group are three PhDs in history, and one who holds two masters degrees in history. All of us are former employees of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources (now Natural and Cultural Resources)…and we all share very similar points of…
Boyd Cathey
April 1, 2019
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Crazed Leftists Strike Again

For thirty-one years the North Carolina Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans has sponsored annually Confederate Flag Day, an event commemorating our state’s rich history and Southern heritage, held in the House of Representatives chamber of the historic 1840 Tar Heel State Capitol. First proclaimed by former Governor James G. Martin in 1988, the day has served as an…
Boyd Cathey
March 11, 2019
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The Idea of Equality in America

Given what is occurring in our society and culture, the ever increasing frenzy and hysteria associated with what is called “the women’s movement” and the ever-changing, always-increasing “racism test,” a review of the basics, a return to and familiarity with our history, is incumbent on us if we are to survive as a nation. Yet, the real problem is that…
Boyd Cathey
February 13, 2019
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Is Secession the Answer?

Watching NBC’s TODAY program on Tuesday, January 23, 2019, there was anchor Savannah Guthrie demanding to know if Covington, Kentucky, Catholic High School student, Nick Sandman, wished to “apologize” for his “actions” in front of the Lincoln Memorial when confronted by Indian activist, Nathan Phillips, on January 19. The scarcely-concealed bias that characterized Guthrie’s question and the continuing media narrative—proven…
Boyd Cathey
February 4, 2019
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What Country Legend Roy Clark’s Death Symbolizes for America in 2018

The news came Thursday, November 15, that country music legend, Virginia-born Roy Clark had passed away at age 85. For those either too young to know who Clark was, or who perhaps never cottoned to “country” music, for a whole generation, for twenty-four years, he was in many ways the heart and soul of the popular country music variety television…
Boyd Cathey
November 28, 2018
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The Multicultural Politically Correct Briar Patch

Despite the establishment attempts to throttle free speech—most recently actions taken by PayPal, by Google, by Facebook, by Amazon and by other major Internet sites to both block access to sites that these lords of the Net consider to be “racist, sexist, extremist, Neo-Confederate and far right,” and to prevent Internet financial transactions for them—still there are intrepid souls out…
Boyd Cathey
October 19, 2018
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A Battle for Western Civilization and the South

On Monday night, August 20, 2018, approximately 200 to 250 raucous demonstrators gathered in a mob on the campus of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and proceeded to tear down the century-old statue, “Silent Sam,” a monument memorializing the over 250 university students who fought and died during the War Between the States. University police, whose primary goal is…
Boyd Cathey
August 23, 2018
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The Death of Historical Accuracy

In case you haven’t heard, there is a new “conservative” film out; it is titled “Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time?” It’s director and screenwriter is Dinesh D’Souza, the somewhat pompous, word-measuring figure who occasionally shows up on Fox to talk in pious tones about “conservatism.” He is the movie producer who, by his own…
Boyd Cathey
August 6, 2018
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Leftist Crazies Don’t Want You to Exist

I try to collect all the business that I must do in Raleigh into one day. One trip a week into North Carolina’s increasingly cosmopolitanized and rapidly de-Southernized capital city is about all I can take these days: it’s become too much like just about any other homogenized, faceless metropolis in any other part of the country. Most of Raleigh’s…
Boyd Cathey
July 5, 2018
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Was Lee a Traitor?

Were Robert E. Lee and the Confederates “traitors” who violated their oaths to the Constitution and attempted to destroy the American nation? Or, were they defenders of that Constitution and of Western Christian civilization? Over the past 158 years those questions have been posed and answers offered countless times. For over a century since Appomattox the majority opinion among writers…
Boyd Cathey
June 18, 2018
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Defending the Monuments

After the Charleston shooting in 2015, all across the old Confederacy memorials, monuments, flags and other symbols of the South’s Confederate history came under renewed and severe assault. It seemed that the last vestiges of that heritage might be swept away in a paroxysm of politically-driven outrage and media-hyped efforts to purge the landscape of those symbols. In many ways…
Boyd Cathey
May 30, 2018
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How the Neocons Destroyed Southern Conservatism

No discussion of Southern conservatism, its history and its relationship to what is termed broadly the “American conservative movement” would be complete without an examination of events that have transpired over the past fifty years and the pivotal role of the powerful intellectual current known as Neoconservatism. From the 1950s into the 1980s Southerners who defended the traditions of the…
Boyd Cathey
May 2, 2018
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Victor Davis Hanson Hates the Confederacy…and the South

“Conservative” writer and classicist Victor Davis Hanson hates the Confederacy and the South; he has demonstrated this repeatedly in recent years through his articles published in National Review (where he is a senior contributor) and in other venues (see, for example, “Sherman’s War,” November 9, 1999; “California Goes Confederate,” Jewish World Review, February 9, 2017;  “The Strange Case of Confederate…
Boyd Cathey
April 12, 2018
Review Posts

Souls of Lions

A review of R. E. Mitchell. Souls of Lions (Bloomington, Indiana: iUniverse LLC, 2014). Very seldom do I review novels, even historical ones. But R. E. Mitchell’s volume, Souls of Lions, after just a few pages, captured my attention and kept me glued to my couch seat for several days until I had finished it…and with its surprising and fascinating…
Boyd Cathey
February 20, 2018
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Memphis and the Assault on Our Western Christian Inheritance

The city fathers of Memphis have been engaged in police state tactics and patently illegal actions, taking down the historic statues honoring General Nathan Bedford Forrest and President Jefferson Davis and the bust memorializing Captain Harvey Mathes of the 37thRegiment Tennessee troops. Despite the Tennessee Heritage Law and the decision of the Tennessee Historical Commission which should have prevented such…
Boyd Cathey
January 22, 2018
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Lee, Kelly, and the Marxists

You would think that David Duke had somehow been elected president. Or, maybe in this topsy-turvy, Alice-in-Wonderland period of history we are living through, that that reactionary “bad guy” Vladimir Putin had somehow actually taken over the White House. The editorial din, the screams of outrage seemed to drown out all other news. Surely, the very fate of the republic…
Boyd Cathey
November 15, 2017
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Demonizing the South to Purify the Nation

Victor Davis Hanson is one of the most lauded and applauded historians of the “conservative establishment.” Honored by President George W. Bush, a regular writer for National Review, spoken of in hushed and admiring tones by pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, Hanson is rightly regarded as a fine classicist and military historian, especially of ancient warfare. But like…
Boyd Cathey
October 19, 2017
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The Marxist Campaign to Transform America

The present feverish campaign to remove Confederate monuments and other symbols which offend certain loud groups  in our society began in earnest back in 2015, after the murder of several black parishioners in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. But that movement dates back much longer. Its real origins go back to the 1960s and early 1970s, and the triumph of…
Boyd Cathey
October 6, 2017
Blog

The Historical Folly of “Nothing but Race.”

At the base of most of the ongoing political debates currently raging in the United Sates there are always, it seems, deeper questions, more philosophical and more historical contexts that need to be examined—what I would call “legacy issues.” Oftentimes assumptions are made or are disseminated by many self-proclaimed defenders of our traditions—by those “conservative apologists”—that bear little relationship to…
Boyd Cathey
September 20, 2017
Blog

Robert Lewis Dabney: A Prophet for Our Own Times

A number of years ago I became interested in the writings of the great Southern author and philosopher Robert Lewis Dabney (d. 1898). Dabney, if he is much known at all these days, is famous because he was chaplain to Confederate general, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and because he penned a Life of General Thomas J. Jackson (1866) and then for…
Boyd Cathey
July 26, 2017
Blog

Robert Lewis Dabney and the New South Creed

Only a few prominent Southerners actively questioned the call for the rapid industrialization of the South or pointed to the broader implications involved in such a policy after the Confederacy's defeat in 1865. Of those who rejected what came to be called "the New South Creed," Robert Lewis Dabney stands out as the most significant and the most deserving of…
Boyd Cathey
July 14, 2017
Blog

Robert E. Lee, Revolution, and the Question of Historical Memory

Two weeks ago New Orleans removed its Robert E. Lee Monument, one of four that the city decided to take down. As well, Charlottesville, Virginia, currently finds itself in the midst of a rancorous debate over its Lee statue. All over the South and the nation moves are afoot to take down monuments, remove flags, hide any symbols that in…
Boyd Cathey
June 5, 2017
Blog

New Orleans: A People Without A Past Have No Future

Early this morning the local television station WRAL, Raleigh, NC, broadcast news that the first of “four Confederate monuments in New Orleans…honoring white supremacy” will come down today. The fate of these monuments has been debated now for a number of years, with the majority black city government wanting to expunge these reminders of New Orleans’ history, while various heritage and…
Boyd Cathey
April 25, 2017
Blog

What Was Lost 150 Years Ago

One-hundred and fifty-two years ago, April 9, 1865 was a Palm Sunday just as today, and in the central part of war-torn Virginia, a major turning point occurred in American history. General Robert E. Lee, that "chevalier sans peur"---that knight without fear---surrendered the tattered remnants of the proud Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant, setting in motion the end…
Boyd Cathey
April 13, 2017
Review Posts

A New Reconstruction: The Renewed Assault on Southern Heritage

This article was originally printed in the Nov/Dec 2015 issue of Confederate Veteran Magazine. In June 2015, after the depraved shootings in a Charleston, South Carolina, black church, a frenzied hue and cry went up and any number of accusations and attacks were made against historic Confederate symbols, in particular, the Confederate Battle Flag. Monuments, markers, flags, plaques, street and…
Boyd Cathey
November 19, 2015
Blog

A Letter from North Carolina

As residents here in the Tar Heel State know, the boards of several of the state's public universities have in recent weeks engaged in a high-profile campaign to change the names of historic and iconic buildings and landmarks on various campuses. First, the board of trustees of East Carolina University in Greenville decided to remove the name of Governor Charles B. Aycock (1901-1905) from an historic residence hall on…
Boyd Cathey
June 18, 2015
Blog

On Abraham Lincoln and the Inversion of American History

Originally published by the Unz Review on 15 April 2015. Back in 1990 in Richmond, Virginia, as part of the Museum of the Confederacy's lecture series, the late Professor Ludwell Johnson, author and  professor of history at William and Mary College, presented a fascinating lecture  titled, “The Lincoln Puzzle: Searching for the Real Honest Abe.” Commenting on the assassination of…
Boyd Cathey
April 17, 2015
Blog

The Eternal ‘Rebel Yell’

Recently, a friend sent me a link on the Smithsonian web site to a 1930 video clip with good sonics of some aged Confederate veterans demonstrating how the famous "Rebel Yell" had sounded some 65 years earlier. All those men were at least in their late 80s, most in their 90s.  But their remarkable spirit still showed through. History and time…
Boyd Cathey
March 26, 2015
Blog

Nathaniel Macon and the Origin of States’ Rights Conservatism

This essay was first published at Unz Review on November 23, 2014. Back in 1975 the Warren County Historical Association initiated a comprehensive project to study the life and legacy of Nathaniel Macon. As a part of this project, both archaeological and architectural studies of his old Buck Spring plantation, near the Roanoke River, were commissioned. Working with the professional…
Boyd Cathey
December 17, 2014
Blog

Classic Confederate Hollywood

Recent releases of four classic films should gladden the hearts of patriotic Southerners and those viewers not yet infected by the currently-raging virus of political correctness and multiculturalism. A few years back Warner Brothers inaugurated an Archive series and began releasing hundreds of classic films that had, in most cases, never shown up previously in any commercially released video format.…
Boyd Cathey
July 30, 2014
Blog

Mel Bradford and the Defense of Southern Conservatism

This past May 8 would have been the late Melvin E. Bradford's 80th birthday. That the anniversary passed without much, if any, commentary is not surprising, given the intellectual tenor now prevalent in American society. Bradford--Mel, to his friends--was an incredible and fluent scholar, extremely well versed in the literature of the American South. He was a superb historian of…
Boyd Cathey
July 17, 2014