Author: Thomas Fleming

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Thank you for visiting The Fleming Foundation website.   You may even have already gone through the process of registering.  If you enjoyed some of the pieces available to free access subscribers, I hope you will consider taking out a paid subscription. A Silver Level subscription for only  $7.99 per month gives access to all print copy, while Gold Level ($150 per year) and Charter subscribers ($250 per year) can also listen to our podcasts on a variety of topics: political realism, learning Latin, the classical Christian tradition, and a series we call “The Best Revenge,” which ranges from the...

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Debunking the Sanctuary Movement, Conclusion

This is the conclusion to my piece from 1985.  The points made include:  1) There is no right of or  justification for “civil disobedience.  Crime is crime, and treason is treason.  2) So-called “liberation theology” is only Marxist revolution with a false Christian gloss, 3) our primary moral obligations to family, community, and  nation take precedence over any imagined obligations to strangers, and, finally 4) the confusion of roles–national government dictating how children are reared while individuals and cities are making foreign policy–is a sign of a profound disorder in American life. Although civil disobedients like to lump their activities...

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Fidel Castro, Dead at Last

Fidel Castro is dead, and USA’s official media are are beside themselves with grief over their fallen leader.  I hate to point out the obvious, but there is virtually nothing good to say about this thug, except he was lucky enough to take over Cuba during an American power vacuum, first when an exhausted and ailing Eisenhower was losing control and, then, when he easily fought off a challenge from a feeble-minded womanizing President who could not find the will to squelch this pustulent sore 90 miles off our coastline. Pre-Castro Cuba was no paradise, but there were economic opportunities.  People could get...

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A Life in Shreds and Patches, Chapter I: In Search of a Vocation, Part A

In Search of a Vocation I have never felt entirely comfortable in my own time.  Most men who have passed the age of seventy, as I have, have lived long enough to seem, and not just to others, fossils from another geological age.  I have felt that way not only recently but already as a boy, and when I read Booth Tarkington, his world appeared quite normal.  It was MGM musicals, Frank Sinatra, and the YMCA that struck me as bizarre.  Even later, when I was trying my best to ape the avant-garde—reading without pleasure the artless productions of the...

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A Diatribe Against “Scholarship” from Arthur Machen

In “A Secret Glory,” the Welsh fantasy writer Arthur Machen describes the foibles of his hero Meyrick, who is forever condemning institutions that fail to live up to the high standards he has set for them.  At first, as a student, I must confess, I shared young Meyrick’s contempt for mere pedantry, though I knew pedants like Douglas Young, Brooks Otis, TRS Broughton, and Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones among others, who (like B.L. Gildersleeve) were scholars in both senses.  I learned too late, however, that even the mere pedants stand head and shoulders above the toad-licking poseurs–Marxists, feminists, deconstructionists–who now infest the humanities....

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Gary Keillor vs. the Yahoos

Desperate to get his name into the news, Garrison Keillor is now posing as a political pundit.  We now live in two nations, civilized Christian people who voted for Hillary and the yahoos who voted for Trump “Broadway shows will now feel obliged to give lectures on diversity to any prominent Trumpist in the audience. Trumpists will explain, as one woman did, “Voting for him was the only way I could say that I exist.” (People who shoot up theaters may feel the same way.) The Trump faction will boycott chamber music concerts, wine tastings, lectures on Byzantine art and poetry...

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Debunking the Sanctuary Movement–30 Years Ago, Part I

This Perspective from January 1986 analyzed the budding sanctuary movement and dissected its entirely bogus spiritual, moral and constitutional foundations.  It infuriated Richard John Neuhaus, who at that time led the movement to silence an irritating political heretic.  I was naive and did not yet realize how much so-called conservatives hate the truth, whenever it conflicts with the short-term goals of their little movement. “Shelter from the Storm” The trial of 12 sanctuary workers in Tucson has heated up an issue which is being hailed in many quarters as the great moral issue of the 1980’s. The movement, whose members...

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When Will We Ever Learn

Mike Pence went to the hottest show on Broadway-a leftist/revolutionary travesty of Alexander Hamilton and, he found himself insulted and attacked by the cast.  He must have been shocked to discover that leftists  are never honorable.  Don’t like the Catholic Church?  Then rape and murder nuns and blow up churches.  Don’t like the Czar?  Murder his family.  Don’t like the way people in Florida and Alabama voted in a presidential election?   Tear up Portland and Los Angeles, where they voted your way. The left has never played by any rules but its own, and those are the simple rules...

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Thomas Fleming: All Gone in Search of America

What does it mean to be an American? Major debates over legislation and proposed constitutional amendments raise the question. Without stretching a point too much, it is easy to see the American identity as the underlying question on the immigration issue, the Equal Rights Amendment, and perhaps even in the debate over abortion. It comes out very clear in discussion of the English Language Amendment sponsored last year by Senator Huddleston of Kentucky and supported by U.S. English, a group headed by former Senator and linguist S.I. Hayakawa. The amendment would make explicit a fact of life obvious to anyone that...

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Jerks, Chapter 2: Taxonomy

In the new millennium, the Americans acting badly are at heart spoiled children who have never learned what it would mean to grow up.  100 years ago, this type was already developing, and Booth Tarkington describes some of these characters in his fiction—the Penrod stories, Little Orvie, and, most effectively, the character of Georgie Minafer in The Magnificent Ambersons.  Georgie was a spoiled rich kid, who despised his social inferiors as riff-raff, but hard times eventually taught him how to be a man. Georgie had been spoiled by a doting mother and aunt, but most boys had to undergo the...