THE METROPOLITAN Museum of Art in New York City is a magnificent temple to art. Its immense galleries celebrate through painstaking preservation and exhibition the best of cultures around the world, offering the chance to explore and gain understanding of Ancient Egypt, Africa, Asia, Islam, Ancient Greece and Rome, and, of course, various ages of European civilization. You will not find anywhere in the non-Western world more sensitivity to and respect for the artistic efforts of distant strangers and races. The artworks in the museum’s collections also include many great works by Europeans depicting and often valorizing foreign cultures, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Bashi-Bazouk,” shown above.

However, a new exhibit at the museum condemns the culture that produced such a museum and its rich diversity. Heather Mac Donald writes at City Journal:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted an exhibit whose curatorial philosophy, were it widely adopted, would spell the end of art and of art museums. The art press greeted the show ecstatically, as a sign of the Met’s new direction. This prognosis is undoubtedly correct.

Fictions of Emancipation (on view through March 5, 2023) is built around an 1873 sculpture by the brilliant French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. The marble bust, titled Why Born Enslaved!, portrays a black woman, bound by a rope, looking over her left shoulder with a piercing expression of defiance, incredulity, and contempt.

Why Born Enslaved! has been understood since its creation as an antislavery work. The Met, however, knows better, now that it has been reborn as an “antiracist” institution. Fictions of Emancipation argues that the Carpeaux bust furthers whites’ ongoing “domination over Black people’s bodies,” in the words of the exhibit’s curators. And Carpeaux was not the only artist to give an aesthetic gloss to racial oppression, while seeming to oppose it—Fictions of Emancipation portrays abolitionist art more widely as a fig leaf for Western colonialism and white supremacy.

I highly recommend Mac Donald’s excellent article in its entirety.

This kind of exhibit, nothing more really than bitterly ugly, Communist-style agitprop, is not surprising of course, but still it’s depressing. The great museums of this country are destined for erasure. They will be obliterated in the flames of resentment and envy. Where truth is not, beauty cannot long survive. (more…)

IN HONOR of black history month, I recommend another essay by the late Elizabeth Wright, who wrote profiles of many successful black businessmen of the pre-civil rights era:

Like so many men of his era, Charles Henry Douglass seized opportunities when they came, and created them when they didn’t. Confident, enterprising and imaginative, he was perfectly matched for the world of business.

His career as a businessman, in Macon, Georgia, spanned 1898 to 1940, as he successfully weathered even the stock market crash of 1929. In the course of those years, he owned or leased close to 100 properties, along with restaurants, saloons, two movie theaters and a hotel.

He was president of the Middle Georgia Savings & Investment Co. for eight years, afterward serving as a director. Early in his career, he had bought shares in this bank (when it was the Georgia Loan & Savings Co.). It is also the place where he met the bank’s cashier, Fannie Appling, who was to become his wife. Respected as one of the black community’s most prosperous and influential citizens, he was credited with helping the city of Macon enlarge its business life.

Who was Douglass? He was a man whose mother and father died when he was barely out of his teens, leaving him to figure out how to support his two younger sisters. With only a rural elementary school education, he became an agricultural laborer. He held his next job, as a carriage driver for a doctor, while also working at a candy manufacturing plant. He managed to support the family until the mid-1890s, when both sisters married. Douglass then left Macon for more profitable work in another city. There, he saved money and returned to Macon in 1898, with $24 to spare.

With this, he bought a partnership in a small bicycle repair and rental business. Thus began a brilliant business career, to which he applied his savvy and intelligence. About the bicycle business, he said, “I did fairly well until the automobile craze came, then I sold out and went into the hotel and real estate business, in which I prospered.” (more…)

LIKE most modern words, "Heresy" is used both vaguely and diversely. It is used vaguely because the modern mind is as averse to precision in ideas as it is enamored of precision in measurement. It is used diversely because, according to the man who uses it, it may represent any one of fifty things. Today, with most people (of those who use the English language), the word "Heresy" connotes bygone and forgotten quarrels, an old prejudice against rational examination. Heresy is therefore thought to be of no contemporary interest. Interest in it is dead, because it deals with matter no one now takes seriously. It is understood that a man may interest himself in a heresy from archaeological curiosity, but if he affirm that it has been of great effect on history and still is, today, of living contemporary moment, he will be hardly understood. Yet the subject of heresy in general is of the highest importance to the individual and to society, and heresy in its particular meaning (which is that of heresy in Christian doctrine) is of special interest for anyone who would understand Europe: the character of Europe and the story of Europe. -- Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies (Sheed and Ward, 1938)  

THE FATHER of 14-year-old Adriana Kuch, who killed herself after being attacked by black students in the hallway of a New Jersey high school, complains of protests by her peers. His initial reaction was harsher: Outraged by the school's lack-luster response, Michael seethed to NBC New York - slamming the institution that his daughter attended. 'A kid is assaulted with a weapon and their policy is not to call the police or file a report,' he said to the broadcaster. He then wrote about the vicious attack on his Facebook calling the attack 'planned.' 'These four girls planned and executed an attack. If you watch the videos I have, they are laughing while talking about what they are going to do at the start of the video,' he wrote. The tragic suicide of this young girl, who obviously had other problems but was reportedly kind and thoughtful, is emblematic of the moral suicide of the white race, which has surrendered itself to decadent guilt, political vanity and cultural self-erasure. As for this school, I feel sorry for every single student. What a rotten place. It's no wonder that non-white students pumped with vile racial hatred almost every day would attack a white girl with fists and racial slurs.  

TROLLING through the archives, I found a 2015 post about Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois — food for thought this Black History Month. But I was especially drawn to the remarks of  commenter Renée from View from the Right:

I am a (mostly) black woman who has white relatives and grew up in a predominately white Midwestern town. I went east to a very liberal college. Nothing prepared me for white liberal students’ need to verify that I was a victim of racism at every turn, and that I felt blacks were being kept out. There were very few blacks at this school, most of them slightly conservative, and we all agreed on one thing: the reason there were so few blacks there was that a school practically in the wilderness with no business program could not attract a lot of blacks. The lack of blacks was not due to racism. No white liberal would believe me on this point. I was constantly asked what it was like to be a black at this school and whether I felt uncomfortable around so many whites. I quickly learned to avoid white people obsessed with the black experience. They were only interested in being entertained by me (they would compare the black students to each other and favor those who were the most ‘hood) or in finding in me an object for their paternalism. Many blacks did not see through this. (more…)

"AS science makes progress in any subject-matter, poetry recedes from it. The two cannot stand together; they belong respectively to two modes of viewing things, which are contradictory of each other. Reason investigates, analyzes, numbers, weighs, measures, ascertains, locates, the objects of its contemplation, and thus gains a scientific knowledge of them. Science results in system, which is complex unity; poetry delights in the indefinite and various as contrasted with unity, and in the simple as contrasted with system. The aim of science is to get a hold of things, to grasp them, to handle them, to comprehend them; that is (to use the familiar term), to master them, or to be superior to them. Its success lies in being able to draw a line round them, and to tell where each of them is to be found within that circumference, and how each lies relatively to all the rest. Its mission is to destroy ignorance, doubt, surmise, suspense, illusions, fears, deceits, according to the "Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas" of the Poet, whose whole passage, by the way, may be taken as drawing out the contrast between the poetical and the scientific. But as to the poetical, very different is the frame of mind which is necessary for its perception. It demands, as its primary condition, that we should not put ourselves above the objects in which it resides, but at their feet; that we should feel them to…

THE UTOPIAN does not believe in the perfectibility of individuals. He is quite pessimistic about the individual. Instead, he believes in the perfectibility of society. The collective can — and must — evolve in order to ensure individual and universal happiness.

The very finiteness of the individual life offends the utopian. He demands immortality, not in another world, but in the right social system. He is zealously optimistic when it comes to what human beings can achieve under the enlightened rule of social engineers or “philosopher kings.”

Understanding the utopian mentality is very important because it is so common today and has strongly influenced all of our lives. The idea, for instance, of controlling the climate through social action, global no less, is utopian to the core.

Étienne Cabet, a 19th-century French philosopher, was one of many thinkers who envisioned utopia. In his Travels to Icaria, he described communities of complete human equality, group ownership and workers cooperatives:

Stables, hospitals, bakeries, factories and warehouses are all on the outskirts of the city, and the inhabitants live in the centre, where the streets are clean, broad and straight. The houses, clustered with balconies, are never more than four stories high … The government is communitarian. The Republic of Icaria is in charge of administration and public services, for instance, but the laws are made by the citizens according to the dictates of their needs and consciences. (Dictionary of Imaginary Places; Macmillan Publishing Co., 1980; p. 173)

Icarians established real communes in Missouri, Iowa and California before the experiment faded away.

In The Republic, his famous dialogue, Plato described the ideal city-state ruled by a philosopher king and where all human reproduction and child-rearing is regulated by the state, so that parents do not know their own children. But utopian thinking predates Plato. It has existed since the beginning of human society — and it will always exist, as Thomas Molnar says in his outstanding book Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. You might call Eve the very first utopian, for she was snared by the promise of a better world, in which she would “know good and evil.” The serpent did not offer riches or beautiful objects. He offered her abstractions. He offered her enlightenment. It is from the first human beings that we inherited “the utopian temptation.”

The utopian seeks political solutions to most human problems. He is willing to sacrifice freedom for the attainment of a long-term objectives. The end always justifies the means. Indeed, one finds very often that the utopian is willing to see his fellow citizens penalized, ostracized, imprisoned or even killed if they do not share the same vision and cooperate with the plan for the future, as is so common in Communist societies and as we recently saw around the world. There’s a fine line between utopia and dystopia — actually, no line at all. The utopian values equality, peace and brotherhood above all else. He does not like friction, but in order to achieve a friction-less society he is willing to create a great deal of friction. (more…)

“Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”
— by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year. (more…)

FEMINISM and predatory economics have had their inevitable (and desired) result. The birthrate among Americans, especially among whites, has declined. The solution promoted by the government and mass media? More immigration. You’ve heard about it ad nauseam.

But leaving aside the immense cultural consequences, this idea of using “migrants” to make up for a loss of native workers does not make sense economically. About 50 percent of immigrants are on welfare and they overwhelmingly come from countries with weak economies. They were not able to transform their own countries into success stories so how can they transform ours? (It’s also uncharitable, draining other countries of motivated, hard-working citizens.) That’s not to say immigrants, even illegal immigrants, have not contributed immense labor and good to this country. They have. They definitely have.

But a better solution to population decline in Europe and America at this particular point would be to do the exact opposite: Send millions of recent immigrants home and restore families, offering economic incentives for marriage and for women to stay home. If women in Africa can afford to have five children, why can’t women here? I do not suggest cruelty or banishment.

Let’s do what Africans are doing and send our migrants home. Mass deportation, in a gradual and humane form, may seem impossible, but consider:

People act like mass deportations are impossible but Algeria kicked out a million Whites (~12% of the population) in a couple of years after they gained independence [1] [2].

Similarly, Tunisia and Morocco each kicked out a quarter of a million Whites (~7% and ~5 of their populations, respectively) [3] [4] [5] [6].

Huge demographic turnovers can occur in the blink of an eye. Europeans were in North Africa for over a century but most non-Whites haven’t even lived in the West for a single decade. They could be sent home as quickly as they arrived.

Peacefully deporting them would, theoretically, be easy and inexpensive. Simply banning them from accessing welfare and making them pay to use public services (e.g. healthcare in Europe) would cause many to immediately self-deport.

Since over 50% of immigrants are on welfare, the money saved could then be used to finance deportation logistics. Even paying them a lump sum to leave would be cheaper than keeping them here. (Thuletide)

The goal of deportation shouldn’t be a racially pure society with no diversity, but a much more homogenous one, where the incentive to “be fruitful and multiply” is not stifled. Deportation needn’t, and shouldn’t, be cruel. Immigrants can be offered economic incentives to create a better life back home. It’s a win/win situation. Who are we to say that other countries should lose major portions of their populations so that we can have more waiters and farm hands? Really, the arrogance and, well, racism is glaring.

This is a solution, however, you will not see in the news. (more…)

ON Dec. 26, 1960, the Philadelphia Eagles played the Green Bay Packers in the NFL Championship game at Franklin Field. It's a long, long way from there to this year's Super Bowl, where the luscious porn star Rihanna will entertain millions. Video clips from that game 63 years ago show a different world, a time when Americans were still civilized.  

"SINCE the French Revolution "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" has been the cry of revolutionaries. So what is wrong with liberty, equality and fraternity? Rightly understood, nothing. But one should know that the Revolution uses words in a perverted sense. In this instance Liberty means freedom from the laws of God; Equality means equality with God, Humanity-as-God; Fraternity means brotherhood among the Enlightened ... It might also mean brotherhood with Christ if He will not insist on His divinity. As the Pharisaic predecessors of the modern Sanhedrin put it, 'We will have no king but Caesar." --- W.F. Strojie, "The New Sandhedrin," 1974  

"THE provider role of men not only gives the society the benefit of a lifetime of hard work oriented toward long-term goals. It also channels and disciplines male energies and aggressions that otherwise turn against that society. By contrast, full-time work by mothers of small children [and older children too] comes at a serious twofold cost: first, the loss of the immeasurable social benefit of the mother's loving care for her child; second, the frequent loss of the husband's full-time concentration on his career. The yield of the mother's job to the economy or the man's help in the home only rarely can offset these costs of her employment. The society will pay the costs one way or another: not only through tremendous outlays for day care but also through economic declines, population loss, juvenile delinquency, crime, mental illness, alcoholism, addiction and divorce. .... Family breakdown and demoralization  can occur with frightening suddenness when government policy destroys the role of the male provider in the family. The alternative to traditional family roles is not a unisex family; it is sexual suicide." -- George Gilder, Men and Marriage (Pelican, 2008); pp. 153-54  

BE glad that it will be a divine tribunal, not a human tribunal, that you will stand before when all has fallen away.

As Fr. Frederick Faber wrote in The Creator And The Creature; Or The Wonders Of Divine Love (Richardson and Son, 1857), p. 388:

No one can look forward without very solemn apprehensions to his final judgment. Yet it is the deliberate conviction of our best thoughts and most mature reflection, that we had rather leave our final doom in the hands of the all-holy God than in those of the most merciful of sinful men. Our knowledge of God does not leave us room for a moment’s hesitation. Strange to say! intimately as we know our own wretchedness, and appalled as we often are by the vision of our own sins, our sense of security in the hands of God rises in great measure from the fact that He knows us better than any one else can know us. (more…)

  "True simplicity is like that of children, who think, speak and act candidly and without craftiness. They believe whatever is told them; they have no care or thought for themselves, especially when with their parents; they cling to them, without going to seek their own satisfactions and consolations, which they take in good faith and enjoy with simplicity, without any curiosity about their causes and effects." —  St. Francis de Sales