Category: Feature

This is the revised first part of an essay I published in 2000 in a magazine I used to edit. I cannot remember a time when I was not what would be called an environmentalist.  I spent much of my childhood walking on an earth unconstricted by concrete streets and unburdened by the weight of buildings.  I was never happier than when I was out fishing with my father or picking berries with my sister, or helping friends with their traps.  Until we moved near Charleston, I had never seen a city that did not deface the landscape, and to...

This multi-cultural hatred of the West was, of course, anticipated in the Communist Manifesto; indeed, it can be traced back through the Enlightenment all the way to Michel de Montaigne in his “Essay on the Cannibals.”  However, Western self-hatred reached a new level of coherence in France after WW I.  When Paul Claudel, Catholic poet, patriot, and diplomat, spoke of preserving the religious and cultural traditions of the West, a coalition of Communists and surrealists denounced him for defending a civilization which the surrealists derided as inferior to all the cultures of the world, high and low.  If the classical...

The History of the Revolution in Three Easy Lessons Lesson One: The revolution began during the Renaissance.  The very name “Renaissance” (or Renascence) suggests that mankind had gone through a long dark age, beginning roughly with the triumph of Christianity in the Age of Constantine.  The early proponents of this movement—classical humanists such as Petrarch and Boccaccio—had honorable goals: They wanted to restore classical Latin, recover ancient manuscripts that lay buried in monastic libraries, and acquire a knowledge of Greek. Like every other movement, however, the Renascence rapidly acquired other objectives;  some of them worthy, such as the civic humanist’s...

Radicalizing Anti-Southern Bigotry The Adamses and their ilk represented the conservative/Old Yankee view of the South.  There was a more radical position before the War, that slavery was a moral evil of so black a color that slaveholders and those who defended them had to be eliminated.   This was the view of John Brown, Wendell Phillips and other radical abolitionists, whose Old Testament ferocity was all the more intense among Unitarians and atheists who had lost every other shred of religion and clung only to their millenarian fantasies of a New Jerusalem, wiped clean of sin, history, and human...

This is the slightly revised and expanded text of a lecture given in March at the Abbeville Institute’s program in Charleston. I Preface My title may strike readers as a bit alarmist.  The word “Jihad” conjures up images of unwashed religious fanatics in a terrorist campaign to eliminate any religious or cultural tradition they find alien.  One thinks immediately of the Taliban wrecking Buddhist shrines, of ISIS strapping their victims to the columns of an ancient temple in Palmyra before blowing both temple and victims to  smithereens.  By contrast, the campaign to eliminate the Southern Identity is being waged by...

Ransom Notes  March 2 2016 Q: Several people have asked me about the Uzbek nanny in Russia who decapitated the child she was minding.  Some news stories have reported that she was distraught because her husband back in Uzbekistan had decided to take a second wife.  Other reports indicated that she was psychotic.  What really was her motivation? TJF: The answer should obvious to anyone familiar with the old Flip Wilson routine whose signature was “the devil made me do it.”  In this case the Uzbek nanny claims allah—which amounts to more or less the same thing—told her to murder...