STEVE KOGAN was one of those people I have been fortunate enough to have struck up an acquaintance with in my years of blogging, but never personally met. An English literature professor for more than 30 years, an accomplished writer who also contributed to View from the Right (under the name “Murray”) and Brussels Journal, Steve was a gracious and warm man.

Sadly, Steve died last August of pancreatic cancer. I am sorry he is no longer with us and wish he could have sent many more essays. May he rest in peace and may his wife, Carol, find consolation in his memory. A collection of Steve’s essays, Against the Grain, is now available at Amazon.

Here is a 2011 essay by Steve that was posted here before, a meditation on a performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear in Brooklyn. During the famous and harrowing tragedy, the audience frequently burst into laughter:

If I had had a counter in my hand, I could have pressed it forty times for every laugh I heard. Many came in response to sharp exchanges of conflicting points of view, as though the audience were being treated to witty repartee, while others followed sadistic comments during the blinding of Gloucester and even scenes of murder, as when Regan collapses – “Sick, O, sick” – after being poisoned by her elder sister, Goneril, who retorts in an aside, “If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.”

 King Lear in New York

– by Steve Kogan –

I HAD A strange and disconcerting night at the theater this spring, when my wife and I saw Derek Jacobi in the title role of Shakespeare’s King Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. On our subway ride back home, my feelings ran so high that we began to quarrel over their intensity, and it was only after we apologized to each either in the morning that I was able to express exactly why my emotions had been roiled. What follows grew out of what I said to her and what I later discovered when I read a review of the production in the New York Times.

In my last two years of college, I took a one-year course on Shakespeare and a senior semester on Lear, which we read scene by scene and line by line. There was a time in my life when I went to the theater to see whatever works of his and his fellow dramatists were being performed in the city, and I developed a way of turning even mediocre acting to advantage by supplying my own imaginary performance as I let the familiar words sink in. When the acting was good, my absorption was complete. (more…)

WHILE Catholics claim Antonin Scalia as one of their own, the Jewish press comes close to doing the same thing, reports Call Me Jorge. Scalia, after all, was a longtime student of the Talmud and was among the justices who ruled that the rabidly supremacist and anti-Christian Chabad-Lubavitch could put their towering menorah on government property near the White House without violating the Establishment Clause. The decision cleared the way for menorahs on government property throughout the country.

“When there was no Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, I considered myself the Jewish justice,” Scalia once said.

From Haaretz:

Scalia’s death prompted pundits to highlight his now-famous relationship with Jewish liberal justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg. Despite their radically differing political philosophies, they remained close friends throughout their years on the court. They would attend operas together and their families would vacation together. Their off-the-bench friendship was so similar to a Romeo-Juliette bond that they even inspired an opera.

(more…)

"POPE" Francis radically distorted the Gospel according to St. Matthew to justify his support for open borders in his recent comments about Donald Trump.

IT'S BEEN over a year since my last fundraiser. Please consider supporting this advertising-free website during this Lenten season. Your kind generosity will help keep one small outlet for contrary views alive. Bear in mind that feminism is supported by all the big honchos. Without that big-money, institutional support, it would have fizzled away. Anti-feminism is truly a grass-roots movement. It depends upon you. Thank you.

CARDINAL Giuseppe Siri, Archbishop of Genoa, had the nerve to say in 1960 that masculine clothing negatively affects the psychology of women. Here is commentary from the famous Italian cardinal. But as we know, pants have liberated women to look wonderful:  

Joseph writes:

This year, the parish of St. John the Baptist (Russian “Orthodox” Church) in D.C. organized a youth ball at the Russian Embassy. It was to be held on St. Tatiana’s day, the patron saint of students, though it was delayed due to the snow storm in late January (St. Tatiana’s day is on January 25). Here is a video of the Dance Polonaise. It is not perfectly executed, but I watched those boys and girls grow up, and it brought a smile to my face. (more…)

IN THIS news report from last fall, Donald Trump mocks the physical condition of a reporter with palsy. He then later apparently lied about it and said he didn’t know the reporter.

Trump here — and elsewhere — is an embarrassment to the cause of preserving America’s borders. (more…)

DONALD Trump, who once attended a same-sex “marriage” and called it “beautiful,” is relatively good for the LGBT cause. He personally supports free marriage and he has been a vocal supporter of “gay rights.” According to Jonathan Jacob Allen:

Donald Trump’s been accused of being a bully and a bigot. But he stands out among Republican presidential hopefuls for his comparative sensitivity to one politically potent minority group: the gay community.

Trump has advocated for banning workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. He criticized a Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses after the U.S. Supreme Court found, earlier this year, that the Constitution protects the right of same-sex couples to marry. He is also one of only two Republican candidates — along with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie — that the Human Rights Campaign deems to have even a “mixed” record on gay rights.

“He is one of the best, if not the best, pro-gay Republican candidates to ever run for the presidency,” said Gregory T. Angelo, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, an advocacy group for LGBT Republicans. (more…)

CHARLES MURRAY writes in the Wall Street Journal on the appeal of Donald Trump to the white working class. “American egalitarianism is on its last legs,” he says. It has produced an elite (much wealthier in real dollars than the elite of 50 years ago) with open snobbery and contempt for the disaffected white lower classes, who have seen decline and community breakdown. Trumpism has replaced Americanism.

“It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America’s divestment of its historic national identity…. Its three core values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty and individualism….Today, the creed has lost its authority and its substance. What happened?….

“In my 2012 book “Coming Apart,” I discussed these new classes at length. The new upper class consists of the people who shape the country’s economy, politics and culture. The new lower class consists of people who have dropped out of some of the most basic institutions of American civic culture, especially work and marriage. Both of these new classes have repudiated the American creed in practice, whatever lip service they may still pay to it. Trumpism is the voice of a beleaguered working class telling us that it too is falling away….. Work and marriage have been central to American civic culture since the founding, and this held true for the white working class into the 1960s. Almost all of the adult men were working or looking for work, and almost all of them were married. (more…)

  Courtesy Call Me Jorge

DR. THOMAS DROLESKEY writes at Christ or Chaos:

Nearly three years after he appeared on the balcony of the Basilica of Saint Peter on Wednesday, March 13, 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has stripped away any pretense of being anything other than an apologist for international Marxism, which is but the stepchild of Judeo-Masonry, and its agenda of One World Governance.

It is not to toot one’s own horn to state the simple fact that there was no need to “wait” to see whether Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a Catholic as his record as the conciliar “archbishop” of Buenos Aires, Argentina, provided all of the evidence that one needed to recognize a man who has been a career-long blaspheming heretic. That some preferred to “wait and see” as they tried to praise the “pope” when he said something that sounded like true elements of Catholicism while reserving to themselves the right to reject that which they knew to be false was inexcusable at the time and even more so now.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a minion and precursor of Antichrist. It is bad enough that he distorted the meaning of the Prophet Jonas’s preaching to the inhabitants of the city of Nineveh in his “homily” during the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on Wednesday, February 17, 2016, Ember Wednesday in Lent. Although this wretched, indecent and vulgar-tongued apostate has given many interviews in the past that have been replete with heresy, the one that he gave today, February 18, 2016, Thursday of the First Week of Lent and the Commemoration of Saint Simeon, shows to anyone who has a modicum of intelligence that he is a willing tool of the New World Order. Modernism is an instrument of helping to establish, institutionalize and propagate this New World Order.

Without any further delay, therefore, permit me to turn your attention to several of the answers provide by Jorge Mario Bergoglio in this latest interview before providing a brief and charitable (charity seeketh the truth, of course) interjections, comments and primal screams:

[…]

Jorge Mario Bergoglio has “excommunicated” Donald John Trump from a generic “Christianity” because of his positions on protecting the borders of the United States of America as he, Bergoglio, deliberately immersed himself into what he knows is a hot-button political issue in this country during an election year. He is an insidious, crapulous hypocrite. (more…)

AS A sensitive and intelligent adolescent, Stephen Heiner discovered that something was deeply amiss with the Church of Vatican II. In this essay, he recounts how he went from the mainstream to the catacombs:

But as I flipped through the Missal, it wasn’t the semi-familiar Canon that reduced me to tears.  It was what came before, which was the Offertory.  I remember gaping, at the verge of tears, the first time my eyes read these words:

Suscipe, Sancte Pater, omnipotens et aeterne Deus, hanc immaculatam hostiam, quam ego indignus  famulus tuus offero tibi Deo meo vivo et vero, pro innumerabilibus peccatis, et offensionibus, et negligentiis meis, et pro omnibus fidelibus christianis vivis atque defunctis: ut mihi et illis proficiat ad salutem in vitam aeternam.  Amen. (more…)

GLORIA Steinem is hardly the anti-establishment figure she pretends to be. The Central Intelligence Agency launched Steinem’s career as a leftist activist. In the recorded interview above, Steinem openly discusses her work as a CIA agent, a fact which she later attempted to suppress. Here are more details from Kerry Bolton’s book Revolution from Above: Manufacturing ‘Dissent’ in the New World Order (Arktos, 2011):

One of the seminal ideologues of feminism, Gloria Steinem, got her start as part of the CIA policy of co-opting the Left during the Cold War era. From this beginning she was promoted and nurtured by the foundations and others of the globalist oligarchy.

Steinem became a Marxist during her student days. She stated to author Susan Mitchell: ‘When I was in college, it was the McCarthy era, and that made me a Marxist.’[ 541] (more…)

IS IT possible to admire this painting, Jackson Pollack’s “Number 17A,” which was bought recently by hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin for $200 million, without knowing it was painted by a famous artist and is worth a lot of money? I say it is not. Not that Pollack had no artistic talent or that this is entirely uninteresting (there is nothing in the world — even a blank piece of paper — that is entirely without visual interest), but if you came across the same image on a discarded painter’s apron in an attic somewhere, would you consider it a work of art and attempt to sell it or keep it?

It is not surprising that abstract expressionism, which shows no sense of place or personality, would be coveted by a globalist, capitalist oligarchy.

Capitalism is to a sound economic order what pornography is to intimacy. It depersonalizes everything it touches. Even art. (more…)

ZIPPY CATHOLIC writes:

Modern people are under the impression that the main function of democratic elections is to exercise individual influence over how we are governed. This is not the case. The main function of elections is to build and maintain social consensus over how we are in fact governed, which is under the political philosophy of liberalism. (more…)

  A READER highly recommends this video about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's death. I am not familiar with "Lionel Nation." He makes good points about blind trust in the government and the demonization of "conspiracy theories." Here is more from him on how the Scalia investigation should have proceeded. Regardless of what happened to Scalia, the handling of his death is a national disgrace, a grotesque violation of the people's trust. (As with all links, this is not a blanket endorsement of a journalist.)

MARK MONCRIEFF wrote in a post last year on the pull of women away from home: The absence of housewives is also evident in making society more lonely, women are not at home, making it hard to connect with neighbours. Anti-crime programs have been dropped because housewives aren't in the home to even look out for anything unusual. Many tasks once done by housewives are now done for money, childcare, looking after the elderly or sick relatives or neighbours, schools now pay people to provide lunches for students instead of mothers doing it. Charities which once relied on housewives to run shops, sort deliveries, visit the sick or elderly, must now pay people to do these tasks. Wonder no more about why you get called by charities so much.