The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary

9

Donald the Duce?

This morning at breakfast, my wife asked me what Piers Morgan meant in calling Donald Trump a Fascist.  Without having read—or even intending to read the column—I was able to state with total conviction.

“Nothing.”

9

Get Back, Donald

Donald Trump has put his big foot, once again, into his bigger mouth. He must be crazy, telling immigrants to go back where they came from, just because they openly declare their hatred for the country that has taken them in. Even Trump’s American friend in the UK, Piers Morgan, has called him on the carpet.

2

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Agrigento

Now to Agrigento, nay, to the selfsame hallowed spot where our Foundation’s eponymous helmsman passed the better part of last winter.  The annual weekend of mulberry picking was upon us, with tubs of pure grain spirit wherever you looked – the better to preserve the foragers’ prize in the cold months to come – and white shirts splattered with the fruit’s arterial blood, crimson as the famous Kensington Gore stage prop. As the day’s harvest was jarred and dinner drew near, a remarkable spectacle unfolded.  The people in a house next door harbor a multitude of cats – perhaps as...

0

Maurice Barrès and the Recovery of National Identity, II

In his novel Les déracinés (1897), Barrès chronicled the adventures of a group of boys at his own lycée in Nancy.  Their philosophy teacher, brilliant and ruthless, instills in them vast, almost Napoleonic ambitions to put their talents into the service of the ongoing revolutionary liberal tradition.  This is a late reflection of the tradition of Romantic heroism that usually ends disastrously in fiction.  Remember Julien Sorel?  Raskolnikov?   What happens to the boys in Paris is the subject of the novel.  Some become dissolute; others are reduced to poverty; but all begin to collaborate on a journal of the...

0

What the Democratic Candidates Reveal to Us So Far

  We’re far enough along in the election process to sum up what the Democratic Party candidates stand for: Foreign Policy. Except for Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang (sort of) and Bernie Sanders, all the candidates want a return to the globalist, interventionist policies that reigned before Trump. Especially indicative was their rejection – again excepting those three – of Trump meeting with Korean Boss Kim Jong at the DMZ. Typical was Elizabeth Warren’s war whoop, “Our President shouldn’t be squandering American influence on photo ops and exchanging love letters with a ruthless dictator. Instead, we should be dealing with North...

4

Wednesday’s Child: Locusts and Wild Honey

I hate to sound like the sort of monomaniacal bore at a cocktail party who will only talk to you about the regrettable slump in hedgehog hospital funding, but really, this is important.  The other week, in a post entitled “Anti-Homestead Acts,” I touched on the news that the ogres in the Kremlin are using tax law to alienate an already starving populace from the tiny kitchen garden plots of land on which the subsistence of millions of Russians, particularly the elderly, had been depending since the 1990’s.  Now, as if such a thing were possible, there comes yet more...

1

The Jaundiced Eye, #2

White people in Detroit got angry when they discovered that, if they wanted to attend a rap concert, they would be charged more than persons of any other color.  Why am I not outraged?  I think any reasonable person would think the poor chumps should be fined and jailed for buying a ticket. The US Women’s Soccer Team is demanding Equal Pay.  I thought they were feminists.  Shouldn’t it be Equal Pay for Equal Play, in which case they should be playing against men’s teams.  Anyone remember Hank Junior’s line, “I’m not a soccer man, I’m an Oilers’ fan.”?  A...

3

Independence Day 2019: Just Say No to Monarchy

If you’ve been in the conservative game even a short time, you know some comrades who want to return to monarchy. Even some libertarians. Maybe the best reasoning comes from Hans-Herman Hoppe, the anarcho-libertarian and disciple of Murray Rothbard. His argument was made at length in “Democracy: The God that Failed.” There’s an 11-minute YouTube of him explaining his theory here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUzkZaD1xDs The problem with these arguments is we don’t live in the colonies of 1776 or the Habsburg Empire of 1900. We live in a time when the regnant form of government is not democracy, republicanism or monarchy, but...