Category: Free Content

This was one of the last pieces published in a magazine I used to write for.   You know how it is when you have over an hour to kill downtown in a major city?  How time seems to slow to a stop?  Fortunately, the Roman houses beneath the Palazzo Valentini, which we were waiting to visit, are a stone’s throw from the column of Trajan.  On that warm and sunny day in February, we took over an empty bench facing the imperial fora and soaked in the sun we should not be seeing, when we returned, for months.  Before...

Part II The several days we spent at Ulivello vibrate in the memory like an hallucination.  Our friend Navrozov has written a beautiful piece about his visit to Ulivello.  The reality was a bit grittier and decayed than he described it—less the odor of jasmine than of hay and manure—but no less magical.  The food was almost a revelation:  pasta, of course, but followed by farm-raised pork, roasted with apples and served with potatoes deep-fried in olive oil. Ulivello had been a sort of farm, worked by share-croppers, and when the Italian government ended share-cropping, the former croppers stayed on...

The Media have taken to describing Illinois as a “Banana Republic”?  So today’s question is: How is Illinois not a Banana Republic?  I await  your answers. My first answer is: Because Banana Republics have beaches and warm winters… And, Banana Republics have distinctive cuisines and excellent coffee not sold by greedy Communists who think the sky is falling…

Long long ago in another galaxy, I wrote a series of pieces looking at the plain meaning of various passages in the New Testament, not as anyone pretending to be a theologian or Biblical scholar, but as a simple philologist seeking the kind of understanding of a Greek text he might get by studying Demosthenes or Sophocles.  I am going to try and dig them up and refurbish them, if I can find them.  I am afraid I wrote some of them for another website that has by now undoubtedly 86ed them, as they say in commercial  kitchens. I tend...

Bernie Sanders’ anti-Christian hissie fit the other day is overheating the Christian chattiverse.  Sanders unloaded on Russell Vought the load of Christ-hating venom he had accumulated in a liftetime devoted to attacking  all things normal, decent, and well-groomed, describing his faith as “insulting,” “hateful,” and indefensible.” Christians are drawing the obvious conclusion that for Sanders and his ilk—and, remember, their name is Legion—any form of orthodox Christian faith is a cause for exclusion from federal office.  First it will be cabinet posts, then federal judgeships, then college scholarships. Unfortunately, too few Christians seem to understand that Sanders is only making explicit...

IV  It’s 2017, and the Rechstaffens have moved from the crazy Bay Area to the crazier Portland, where Fritz IV (J.J.) is doing well as head of an immigrants’ rights organization and Democratic Party activist.  He had worked hard for Bernie, but, when his candidate lost, he cheerfully rolled up his sleeves to work for the first woman that would be elected President of the Free World, the human race, and the entire universe.   He makes no bones about his loathing of all things Trump, and that is the one subject on which he and his former son, Fritz...

Time is running out, but there is still time to sign up for our special program on the roots of the revolutionary tradition.    In addition to the lecturers we have already announced we hope to have two old friends with us:  Christopher Check, my former second-in-command, who will be speaking on the Mexican Revolution and the persecution of Christians, and Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, who will share his thoughts on recent developments in Russia.  If you are still hesitating, about coming, then read the letter below one more time.   Dear Friend and Fellow-Reader: “The lamps are going out all...

American bigots are always complaining about Islamic violence.  They apparently are incapable of listening to the reasonable and fact-based arguments put forth by their democratically elected monarchs.  George Bush explained to us that Islam was a “religion of peace,” and his successor gave us the  valuable lesson in American history that Muslims had been with us from the beginning.  Of course they were, doesn’t anyone remember the Terrorists who went by the name of Barbary Pirates? For all these reasons and many more, American bigots should beware of drawing conclusions from the recent attack in Manchester, England, that left 22...