In the early 1980s I was involved with the startup of a “humor magazine” that never went anywhere after its colorful-but-vague pilot issue. Apart from a couple of National Lampoon veterans, we were mostly post-collegiate types, full of quirky, off-the-wall ideas from our own days at colorful-but-vague college humor mags. It was around this time that one of my colleagues mentioned, as a bit of curious arcana, that he had heard that somewhere out there was a racist humor magazine. (more…)
Author: Margot Metroland
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Editor’s Note: March 31 marks the 115th birthday of Robert Brasillach, the French journalist, novelist, film historian, and man of the Right who was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad for “intellectual crimes” he was alleged to have committed as a German collaborator during the Second World War. The following translation is offered as a commemoration, and links to other resources regarding Brasillach’s life and work are included at the end. (more…)
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Like her near-contemporary Gore Vidal (both were born in 1925), the fiction writer Mary Flannery O’Connor had her first brush with fame via a Pathé movie newsreel. She had a pet chicken whom she’d taught to walk backward. Gore’s fame came a few years later when he piloted an airplane, age ten. (more…)
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Edward H. Miller
A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021A writer friend of mine, now long ensconced in the Condé Nast glossies, used to regale us with his mother’s nutty ideas on matters of politics and society. For example, when the kids were young and at the Safeway in Palo Alto, mom would loudly refuse to buy Welch’s grape juice or jelly — even the grape jelly that came in Flintstones glasses — because that would be giving money to the John Birch Society. (more…)
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This was supposed to be a year-end book roundup, but I had a difficult end of year. So for the present I’ll pretend this is the 53rd or 54th week of 2023 (a nasty year altogether).
When my husband died a few weeks ago, I found a number of “overdue” library books in all manner of places. I stacked them by the door. That’s pretty much how we did things here. He’d take out a lot of books and then, when he saw me making an exit, he’d go, “Oh, if you’re going out, could you take those back to the library?” He’d say that even if I was just going out to the trash bay. (more…)
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Standardbearers: British Roots of the New Right
Edited by Jonathan Bowden, Eddy Butler, & Adrian Davies
Foreword by Professor Antony Flew
Beckenham, Kent: The Bloomsbury Forum, 1999Somewhere between the “hug-a-hoodie” Toryism of David Cameron’s Conservatives, and those far-Right parties considered beyond the pale, is believed to lie a broad “respectable” middle ground of British nationalist politics. (more…)
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It ought to be mighty difficult to make a bad production — be it documentary, fictionalized, semi-fictionalized — out of the career of master spy Kim Philby. Yet, somehow the makers of the six-part mini-series A Spy Among Friends have succeeded in that grim task. (First broadcast a year ago in England on ITVX; in America it’s streaming on MGM+.) This is not from lack of talent or production values. Rather, the problem appears to be poor knowledge of the subject and lack of respect for the available material, most notably the wonderful Ben Macintyre book of the same title, which inspired the TV series but did not inform it to any great extent — alas! (more…)
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One of America’s oldest missing-person mysteries was solved this past July in Texas. DNA tests identified the remains of a woman who’d been murdered in Colorado County, Texas, most likely in 1975. The dead woman had a sister, the sister finally came forward, and forensics found a match. (more…)
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2,507 words
Jonathan Bowden (ed. by Greg Johnson)
The Cultured Thug
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2023Stylistically there are two kinds of Jonathan Bowden essay. There are the neat, trim, polished ones that clock in at 800 to 1,100 words, like a review in The Spectator. Then there are the luxuriant, digressive ones that are always rambling off onto weird, and often interesting, tangents. The difference between the two is that the latter kind usually come to us as transcripts of speeches from gatherings where Bowden had an hour or more to fill, and thus had good reason to pad out his thesis with amusing asides and intriguing anecdotes. (more…)
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It is intriguing, and often maddening, to research an author or historical figure and discover that there’s very little material to be found. With today’s newspaper and genealogical databases, such lack of information is itself suspicious. Perhaps the person just didn’t want to be found, or spent his life trying to keep his name out of the newspapers. And there’s always the possibility that for practical or professional reasons our subject wrote mostly under pseudonyms, such as “Lewis Carroll” or “Ulick Varange.” (more…)
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Frederick Charles Ferdinand Weiss is one of the more elusive figures of the mid-twentieth-century American Right. The smudgy late-1940s snapshot I’ve scanned here — Fred on a Yorkville doorstep — and then duotoned in an attempt to make it presentable seems to be the only portrait available. That may be symbolic.
60 or more years ago, Fred sometimes popped up in Drew Pearson’s political-gossip columns, usually named alongside H. Keith Thompson and “Ulick Varange” (alias Francis Yockey or Frank Healy), in a purported triumvirate of intellectuals and activists affiliated with the new Socialist Reich Party (SRP) in West Germany in the early 1950s. (more…)
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The following is a commemoration for Willis A. Carto, who was born 97 years ago today.
For me, one of the great takeaways from the Willis Allison Carto Online Presidential Library is watching the conservative mainstream drift off into the distance while Mr. Carto basically stayed in the same place. Beginning in the mid-1950s and rolling through later correspondence is like standing in the middle of “Pangea” — the theoretical original single continent that all of Earth’s present continents were once part of — and watching plate tectonics gradually pull the various pieces away from the center. (more…)