What is a high-trust society?

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“What do they know of England who only England know?” Rudyard Kipling’s famous question, a line from his poem The English Flag, was actually written in defense of Empire, but is still worth asking by Englishmen in these post-imperial times. Enoch Powell, however, found the phrase sadly outdated. In a speech given on St. George’s Day, 1961, to London’s Royal Society of St. George, Powell (then Minister of Health) said:

It is a saying which dates. It has a period aroma… That phase is ended, so plainly ended, that even the generation born at its zenith, for whom the realization is the hardest, no longer deceive themselves as to the fact.

Powell, a man so steeped in the classics that he took down his House of Commons notes in Ancient Greek, put the decline of the British Empire in the context of past, faded imperial glories, and compared England with ancient Athens. When he gave the speech, I was 44 days old, born and living in London. I’m 63 years old now and, although I now reside elsewhere, comparing England with Athens is hardly realistic, unless you mean Athens, Georgia.

But, by Kipling’s reasoning, and having spent the last decade in Central America, I should now know more of England. How does it compare with Costa Rica? Global crime rate statistics from 146 countries place Costa Rica 20 places higher than the UK, at 42 and 62 respectively, but that doesn’t seem a particularly wide global margin between a 3rd-world country and the nation that used to run that same globe.

The respective economies of the two countries are, of course, wholly different considerations. The UK has an official population of around 70 million and is a member of the G7, while Costa Rica, with a population of 5 million, has as its main economic claim to fame its nickname, “the Switzerland of Central America”. When you see that it is up against the likes of Guatemala and Honduras, however, this epithet is flattering. All that said, Costa Rica’s latest GDP figures show growth of 4.5%, far outstripping the UK’s at 0.6%. Curiously, although Britain’s fertility rate is well below replacement level at 1.56, Costa Rica’s is just 1.53.

There is one obvious comparison to be made, however, and it took me a while to realize that I had moved from a high-trust society to a low-trust one. But what is a high- or low-trust society? Definitions differ. Some concentrate on trust in authority, and John Locke saw trust as essential to constitutional government. This is trust in government, the police, medical staff, teachers, the judiciary and so on, which I suppose might be called vertical trust. Others give precedence to interpersonal trust, which by the same token might be termed horizontal trust. The latter is easier to assess. Put simply, and to adapt an old English joke about barmen, what do you get if you cross a Costa Rican with an alligator? An alligator that steals from you. The attitude towards theft here is casual, particularly if the party stolen from is a gringo. A couple of examples.

I spoke to a Canadian woman who hired a cleaner, a Tica (Ticos and Ticas are the names Costa Ricans give themselves). Like everyone else, she stacks coins in piles as spare change. She noticed that a pile of coins would go missing now and then, and she confronted the cleaner. The woman quite innocently said, yes, I did take them. I didn’t think you were using them. In terms of organized crime, I appreciate that this is minor, but indicative. Next, something more personal.

I lived in an apartment for five years and the owner, another Canadian, decided to sell. She gave me a generous three-month notice period, and I was offered a house to share by a local musician, a very talented guitarist. The rent was 40,000 colones a month each (around $80US), plus the same as a deposit. I didn’t even have to take his word for that as he showed me the contract. I moved in, and it was a strange and beautiful place, made entirely of wood and smack in the middle of a palm-oil plantation. Troupes of monkeys (of the Squirrel and Capuchin variety, plus the occasional Howler) would come through the palm trees every day. I paid my housemate my half of the rent every month and he paid the owner. One month, I was in town so I decided to call in and pay my half personally. The owner was very surprised that I wanted to pay 40,000, as the whole sum was only 60,000. I said, no, there must be some mistake, it’s 80,000. He showed me the contract, the actual contract, not the one my housemate had dummied up in order to con an extra 10,000 a month out of me. If you are gringo here, and you don’t check every transaction and agree a price before you make it, you will be ripped off in taxis, markets, stores and anywhere else you can spend money. And it’s not just money. An American woman told me she called a repair man to fix her fridge. He took it away, taking care to give her a false name and address, as well as a worthless receipt. She never saw him or her refrigerator again. So much for the locals.

Then there are the north Americans who go native. I played bass for a while for a blues band fronted by a guitarist from Austin, Texas. He had met Stevie Ray Vaughan. When I first got the gig, every other musician told me not to trust the guy on tips, tipping being big here. One night, I saw a guy fold a $20 bill into the tip jar. The guitarist told me that the guy who left the tip was a friend and couldn’t afford to leave $20. He was going to give it back. I watched him and, of course, he did no such thing, just joked with his friend. After the gig, when it came to dividing the tips, the twenty was gone. Now, this may seem trifling, but there is a code about money among musicians the context of which explains what a low trick that was.

Then there are utilities. My Canadian landlord told me that the electricity bill had spiked, and I would have to pay more. I told him that I used exactly the same amount of electricity (in that I used the same devices the same amount) as I had in my old apartment, where the bill was always around 10,000 colones a month, and I knew that electricity prices are not regionally different here from where I used to live. But if he wanted to bring over the bills to compare the periods before and after I moved in, I’d be happy to pay as long as I saw the proof of the increase. It was never mentioned again. It’s a poor country, but these expats aren’t poor, and I am far less well off than both. They have both been here in excess of 20 years, and have essentially become honorary Ticos.

These are just the more colorful examples from many, and interpersonal trust, what I called horizontal trust, is low. What about widening the horizon to the societal level? Litter is not a problem here, as Costa Ricans have an innate respect for their environment. But I was a little surprised to see that rural bus-stops do not feature litter-bins for what little trash there is. Bus-stops are a place where people congregate, and so if there will be trash anywhere, that’s where you’ll find it. Kids hang around the bus-stop here just as much as they do – or did – in England when I was a kid. So why no bins? Because, a friendly American who clears up our local bus stop once a week tells me, they would immediately be stolen. They make useful containers, you see, and this is a poor country. You can tell that by the taxi rank. Eight taxis sit there, engines off. When a fare takes the first, all the others move up one space, but they don’t start their engines to do so. They all open their doors and push the cars into place to save petrol. Margins are tight here for the working man, far tighter than for their equivalent in the UK. But back to trust, and it’s time to look at bicycles.

There are a lot of bikes here, often left outside shops while the owner goes inside. I have never, once, seen a bike locked or chained up. In London, if you leave a bicycle unlocked even for a couple of minutes, you’ve ridden it for the last time because it will be gone when you return. You might object that the value of the bike in London is likely to be far greater than the cow-horned rattlers some ride around on here – who wants to nick a cheap bike? – but that would be to miss the point entirely. The value isn’t primarily financial. It’s practical. When I owned a canal boat, I was given a bicycle, but left with the problem of how to get rid of the old one. I detest fly-tipping, and as I had no fixed address, I couldn’t have the local council take it away. Then the answer hit me. I leant it against a tree on the towpath and went for a drink. Sure enough, when I returned, it was gone. Sometimes low trust can work for you. Now, in London, even locking a bike with an expensive gadget may not help, as thieves use angle-grinders to cut them off.

An example of the Costa Rican judicial system, or rather one of its local branches, and how they deal with breach-of-trust laws. One morning, I left my apartment to visit the shop across the road, and saw a couple of the Ticos who worked there outside giving another guy what we English would call “a bit of a slap”. They weren’t really beating him up, just knocking him about and intimidating him. A bicycle was lying on the ground but, when the staff eventually let him go, he didn’t ride off on it. I asked one of the shop-girls what the trouble was about and she told me; “Estada intendando robar la bicicleta”. He was trying to steal the bike, until her male colleagues intervened. In a townful of unattended, unlocked bicycles, he had crossed a bright line. He had sinned, which takes us to the church.

It is a beautiful building whose roof is concave and made from highly-polished teak, one of Costa Rica’s main exports. It looks like an upside-down boat’s hull. Now, this church is full of very stealable items, some made of gold. The windows are high but they are not glassed and would be easily accessible with a ladder. Thieves could be in and out in minutes at night, and considerably richer. In England, a church like this would be robbed and gutted, and quite possibly burnt down. But nobody does that here. The local thieves are certainly not afraid of the police. Must be someone else that dissuades them. Now let’s leave church, watching the drivers cross themselves as they pass the statue of the Virgin, and go to the beach.

A 15-minute bus ride from the town is a beach rated by TripAdvisor as the 12th-best in the world. It’s a tourist attraction, as you might imagine. One day, there was a crew of Nicaraguans stealing people’s belongings. Nicaraguans seem to be natural thieves, and the Costa Ricans even have a saying about the country to the north. The are three seasons in Costa Rica. The rainy season, the dry season, and the season when we have a problem with Nicaragua. Anyway, a group of locals saw this going on, cornered the gang, and started beating them up. They know that tourism is the lifeblood of the country, and robbing tourists will hardly improve figures in an industry still trying to recover from Covid. When the police arrived to help, they did just that. They helped the locals beat up the gang. Trust. Back to England.

In the UK, there has been a rise in the use of machetes in incidents of violent crime. The Government did what they always do, which was to introduce a ban, in the apparent belief that the sort of human being who would take a machete to another human being will suddenly respect the rule of law and drop his blade in at the local amnesty bin. There is no need for a machete even to exist in Britain. I suppose a farmer might have a use for one, but there is no jungle or rain-forest there, as there is in profusion here, where machetes are freely available. In my local town, there is a hardware store. In a large plastic bin by the door to the street, there is a selection of machetes. It is legal to carry one in public as long as it is sheathed. Anyone, should they so wish, could scoop up half a dozen of these blades and be away before a shop assistant had even noticed. But no one does. They are trusted not to.

At the time of writing, today is September 15, La día de la independencia. I wrote about Costa Rican Independence Day at Counter Currents here in 2021 and again last year, and these pieces give the background to Central American independence from Spain in 1821, as well as some local color, should you be interested. The first fireworks went off at 4am, even before the first roosters were awake, to signal Costa Rica’s happiest day of the year. I am almost certainly the only person in the town who is unhappy.

To see the marching bands of smiling, proud children in the local town, to see the streets awash in, ironically, red, white, and blue (the colors of both the Costa Rican and British national flags), to feel nationalistically lonely amid the camaraderie of people whose nation ranks 12th in the World Happiness Index, tells me much about England. In my country, displays of nationalism such as today’s have been frowned on for some time, and are edging closer to being criminalized. This is only the case in England, and does not apply to the other countries in the union. While traditional Costa Rican dancing, with its ribbons and swirling dresses making it a cousin to flamenco, is being enjoyed by Costa Ricans, English schoolchildren are taught that the history of their country is one of which they should be ashamed. While Pakistanis and Indians throng the streets of English cities for their national independence day, St. George’s Day celebrations are becomingly increasingly rare, and something of which the State disapproves. England is being steadily erased, first from the world stage, and then from the consciousness of the children who form what there is of its future. The last lines of Powell’s 1961 St. George’s Day speech show his prescience every bit as much as his more famous speech in 1968:

The danger is not always violence and force, them we have withstood before and can again. The peril can also be indifference and humbug, which might squander the accumulated wealth of tradition and devalue our sacred symbolism to achieve some cheap compromise or some evanescent purpose.

The last couplet of Kipling’s poem is as follows:

What is the flag of England? Ye have but my breath to dare,
Ye have but my waves to conquer. Go forth, for it is there!

England once ruled the waves and was unconquerable, where now she is being invaded by undocumented conquerors across the once-impregnable English Channel. Hitler couldn’t do it. Caesar and Claudius managed it, but didn’t stay long. William the Conqueror also invaded – the clue’s in the name – but he and his men chose to do what today’s Muslim hordes have no intention of doing. They integrated.

But, sadder still for a self-imposed exile such as myself, is that I can never go home. Another English poem from an attractive canon of poems about the old country is Browning’s Home Thoughts from Abroad, which begins:

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England – now!

A shame I can’t see all that anywhere now except in my mind’s eye, but sometimes you can’t go home again. England Made Me was the title of a Graham Green novel, but its alternative title was The Shipwrecked. Well, England made me too, but I’m shipwrecked and I can’t even go back to thank her. There are people there I no longer trust.

James Edwards Interviews Lew Moore

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What follows is an interview conducted by James Edwards with Lew Moore, a former congressional chief of staff, speechwriter, and the national campaign manager for Ron Paul’s famous presidential bid. He is also the author of Forerunner: The Unlikely Role of Ron Paul.

James Edwards: You served as Chief of Staff for Congressman Jack Metcalf (R-WA) from 1995-2001. Please tell us a little bit about his policies.

Lew Moore: First, Jack was one of a kind, well known in the Northwest as a political “maverick.” He was America first all the way. He had strong views on the three classic populist issues: trade, immigration, and endless wars. He also believed the core of our problems lies with the Federal Reserve bank and the shadowy, globalist figures behind what is essentially a private institution. He had a basic belief in traditional values and small constitutional government and was clearly a “real” Republican.

Nonetheless, Jack had no qualms about reaching out to labor, to conservationists, and to people of goodwill on “the left” who had the same concerns he did about the concentration of power in the country and the erosion of our culture.

Edwards: What were your duties and responsibilities as his chief of staff?

Moore: I was responsible for managing the staff, usually around 18 folks, divided between D.C. and our district. I was involved with hiring. I was a surrogate for the congressman in media appearances and other events. I represented him in meetings with other congressional and senatorial staffs. I was ultimately responsible for ensuring he had access to all the arguments surrounding an important issue. I gave him advice. I wrote speeches. I interfaced with the teams working on his various campaigns.

Edwards: Being in Washington, D.C. during those years must have been quite memorable. What is it like to be in the middle of the American political system?

Moore: The political junkie inside of me was like a kid in the candy store. They call politics “the Great Game,” and it can certainly be exciting, at times. Meeting serious people with a lot of first-hand knowledge about government and politics was wonderful and had a huge impact on me. Meeting unserious, career-climbing types was tedious, and, at times, nauseating. Seeing the trajectory of decline America was on was sobering and frightening.

Edwards: After Rep. Metcalf retired, you went on to become the campaign manager for Congressman Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential bid. This was a groundbreaking campaign with historic enthusiasm. Will you share with us a couple of your favorite memories?

Moore: Once, I returned to the campaign office after a late dinner meeting that was long and engrossing. The office was packed full of young staffers on the phone, bustling about. The mood was great. The energy was incredible. But something seemed off. I looked at my phone. It was nearly one in the morning. No one wanted to go home. It was unbelievable.

Once, Ron came to Seattle for a rally, my home at the time. It was indoors, about 2,000 supporters packed into a hotel ballroom. He asked me to warm up the crowd and introduce him. I walked up to the podium and the place went wild before I said a word; deafening noise, but not for me. They wanted to get the thing rockin’.

I looked down at the state party chairman on the front row (not a supporter) and he looked terrified. I introduced Ron and the place went nuts. I was admittedly extremely proud of the energy “my hometown” crowd produced for the “Champion of the Constitution.”

Edwards: The Republican establishment was hellbent on stopping Ron Paul and minimizing the reach of his message in 2008 and 2012. What do you remember about this?

Moore: They tried to keep Dr. Paul out of the debates, right from the beginning. The first major GOP candidate debate in 2008, in “First in the Nation” Iowa, excluded Ron. So we rented the hall across from them in a large convention center and had a rally that drew several times more people than the John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee snore-session debate attracted.

In 2012, the RNC held a rigged voice-vote on the convention floor. The establishment brought forth a motion to prevent future insurgent campaigns from using the traditional caucus system to acquire delegates. Conservative activists joined Ron Paulers in shaking the rafters with a resounding “no,” but the RNC chair lamely read “the ayes have it” from a teleprompter. This whole shabby effort was 100% a reaction to the success of the Paul campaign in 2012.

There was constant “trench warfare” between Ron Paulers and the establishment within the GOP in every state in both of those elections.

Edwards: As you traveled the country with Ron Paul, did you get the sense that there was a growing movement that would be reckoned with in the future no matter how that campaign ended?

Moore: Absolutely. One tell was that Dr. Paul was getting support from people of nearly every background and ideology. At one juncture in the campaign, hundreds marched for Ron Paul in San Francisco, arguably the most liberal city in the country. He then got on a plane and flew to a rally in Salt Lake City, in possibly the most conservative state in the nation where he spoke before thousands.

As you have pointed out many times, Pat Buchanan had no doubt that his ideas, basically the same ideas espoused by Dr. Paul, would have their moment. I felt that way myself about the Buchanan campaigns, and was fortified in that belief when I witnessed the grassroots explosion that was the Paul campaign of 2008.

Edwards: Ultimately, the GOP establishment would indeed become radically changed. In your book, Forerunner: The Unlikely Role of Ron Paul, you deliver a first-person account of how a brewing middle-class/populist rebellion could first be seen in the surprising energy surrounding Rep. Paul’s presidential campaign. How is there a direct connection between the presidential campaign that you managed, the Buchanan campaigns of 1992, 1996, and 2000, and the explosion of the MAGA rallies that led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016?

Moore: The populist thread that runs from the Buchanan campaigns, through the Ron Paul campaigns to Donald Trump was centered around three key issues: trade, immigration, and endless wars. Each candidate decried globalist trade agreements like NAFTA, and the effects of deindustrialization on the United States.

Each candidate vigorously opposed illegal immigration and advocated building a wall. And each one of them vigorously opposed globalist “nation building” and committing our troops to foreign wars with no objective that aligned with the interests of only a handful of the American people.

There are also direct connections. Many don’t know Dr. Paul was an advisor to the Buchanan campaign of 1992. A number of Pat’s key state leaders performed the same role for the Paul campaigns of 2008 and 2012. Ron Paulers formed the activist core of on-the-ground organizing for Trump in several parts of the country in 2016.

Edwards: As a savvy and seasoned political operative, what is your survey of the current presidential race?

Moore: One day can be an eternity this late in a high-stakes race, so the snapshot of today may not mean much tomorrow. I think much of the enthusiasm we are assured is out there for Harris is manufactured. I think a lot of votes for her in the swing states will be “manufactured” as well. I think if she obviously falters before the election there will be another attempt on Trump’s life. I mean that. The powers that be obviously don’t want Trump in office. Look at the lawfare and everything else. On the other hand, Trump is a very imperfect vessel under a huge amount of pressure to trim his sails, which I believe also hurts his electability. We have already seen that. This is a wild one. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Edwards: Democrats never miss an opportunity to infuse racial politics into the conversation, almost constantly mentioning what they will do explicitly for black voters and other minorities. The Republicans also pander to certain racial and ethnic groups, but never to the majority of voters most likely to support them. Why are Republicans so afraid to mention White voters when naming the people they seek to represent?

Moore: The Republicans look ridiculous when they trim their sails and pander to every different group. It is no longer “outside the Overton Window” to state that every part of our agenda must relate to saving Western civilization. In this age of massive cynicism and rapid communications, we have the opportunity to take our politics away from the special interests and their social engineers, but we cannot do it without authentic candidates who have that central objective. And that means no pandering.

It is in the interest of all people of goodwill to save the “white male” from the constant campaign of vilification orchestrated by powerful financial interests animated by the satanic dogmas based essentially on Marxism. The Great Replacement, if it is successful, will not go well for anyone except those who wish total control for themselves and an end to the civilization that has been a blessing for all of humanity.

Edwards: If you were Donald Trump’s campaign manager, what advice would you give him that would ensure his victory in November?

Moore: Get rid of your advisors who want you to “move to the middle” and pander to outlying groups. Stay on your core America First message. Deport illegals. Restore energy independence. Bring manufacturing back to our country. Purge our institutions of manifest, misnamed evils like CRT, ESG, and particularly DEI. Make clear we will use our economic and military strength as leverage, but only for the interests of actual Americans.

We must quit spending our strength on those who would entangle us all over the world to our detriment, with the agenda of destroying us as a nation and as a people.

Winged in a Wheelchair: Celebrating the Literary Magic of Children’s Author Rosemary Sutcliff

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“Raw with newness.” That’s a phrase from the most famous book by the great English writer Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92). She’s describing Hadrian’s Wall, the giant Roman fortification completed in about 130 A.D., nearly two thousand years ago. That’s what the book, The Eagle of the Ninth (1954), allows both children and adults to do: fly back through the centuries to a world where Hadrian’s Wall is new and Celtic Britain part-conquered by Imperial Rome. Sutcliff had a very powerful pair of what another great English writer, Lytton Strachey, once called “the wings of Historic Imagination.” And she was a winged wordsmith in more ways than one, skilled at breathing life into what Homer called ἔπεα πτερόεντα, epea pteroenta, “winged words” that could fly without limit through space and time.

Tamed wolves and honey cakes

Her words had wings because she had wings. Sutcliff could fly back into the past of the British Isles with the speed and strength of an eagle. Once she was there, she could transform into another kind of bird. She was a literary hummingbird too, darting and dipping and hovering, able to examine people and clothing, buildings and weapons in minute detail and from every angle. And then, with the magic of words, she could make her readers see those details too: the brand of Mithraic initiation between the brows of a Roman officer; the wind-and-water-like whorls decorating a Celtic shield; the crumbling red sandstone of an abandoned fort in the northern wilds.

Winged in a wheelchair: Rosemary Sutcliff and her most famous book

But sight isn’t the only sense she can evoke with surety and skill. When you read Sutcliff, you hear, smell, touch and taste the past centuries of Britain too. You hear “the bright notes of a struck harp” in the Saxon town she brought to life in The Lantern Bearers (1959). You smell “roasting meat, and seaweed, and dung” there. You touch the fur of a tamed wolf in Eagle of the Ninth and taste “honey cakes” cooked by a slave called Sassticca (sic). The past lives for all of the senses in Sutcliff’s books. And so does the present. She could evoke what has been lost for millennia and also what is still here, because she knew and loved Britain’s wildlife and wildflowers, streams and stones, light and landscape. She could give life to foxes and ferns and rivers and rain and everything else that came before and lived on after the Romans. Here is the Roman protagonist of Eagle of the Ninth experiencing two thousand years ago in the far north what some of us still experience today:

Marcus sat with his hands locked round his updrawn knees and stared out over the firth. The sun was hot on the nape of his neck, scorching his shoulders through the cloth of his tunic. … He heard the bees zooming among the bell-heather of the clearing, smelled the warm aromatic scents of the birch-woods overlaying the cold saltiness of the sea; singled out one among the wheeling gulls and watched it until it became lost in a flickering cloud of sun-touched wings. (The Eagle of the Ninth, chapter 12)

That’s an example of how Sutcliff had learned from one of her own literary heroes. As a child, she had praised Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) to her mother, saying that “other people write about things from the outside in, but Kipling writes about them from the inside out.” Sutcliff too wrote from the inside out, allowing her readers to experience the world of her characters with all the senses. And with all the emotions and intellect. In her books, Sutcliff is always contrasting and connecting the human world and the world of nature, just as she’s always contrasting and connecting civilization and barbarism. There are two young men at the heart of Eagle of the Ninth, a Roman called Marcus and a Celt called Esca. They become friends across the gulfs of culture and experience that separate them. Again and again, there’s contrast and connection. First Esca is slave to Marcus, then he’s freed by Marcus. First the two of them live on Roman territory to the south, then they pass beyond the raw newness of Hadrian’s Wall and enter the barbarian north:

[T]hey rode together in companionable silence, their horses’ unshod hooves almost soundless on the rough turf. No roads in the wilderness and no shoe-smiths either. The country south of the Wall had been wild and solitary enough, but the land through which they rode that day seemed to hold no living thing save the roe-deer and the mountain fox; and though only the man-made wall shut it off from the south, the hills here seemed more desolate and the distances darker.

It was almost like seeing a friendly face in a crowd of strangers when, long after noon, they came dipping down over a shoulder of the high moors into a narrow glen through which a thread of white water purled down over shelving stones, where the rowan trees were in flower, filling the warm air with the scent of honey. (The Eagle of the Ninth, chapter 11)

That’s another good example of Sutcliff’s literary skill and powers of evocation, of the contrasts she could draw and the connections she should make. A change in landscape is like a friendly face, familiar amid forbidding wilderness. But Marcus and Esca had known the wild even while they lived in a Roman town far to the south. They need to test the loyalty of a wolf they’ve tamed in cubhood, so they release him to explore a forest, then wait to see if he returns:

In their silence, the wild had drawn close in to the two in the vantage point. Presently a red glint slipping through the uncurling bracken and young foxgloves at the lower end of the clearing told them where a vixen passed. She paused an instant in full view, her pointed muzzle raised, the sun shining with almost metallic lustre on her coat; then she turned in among the trees. And watching the russet glint of her flicker out of sight, Marcus found himself thinking of Cottia. (The Eagle of the Ninth, chapter 9)

Cottia is a Celtic girl with red hair; Marcus is a dark-haired Roman forced out of military service by a wounded thigh. They both live in Britain, but Cottia is like the native fox, Marcus is a foreigner, an outsider to the Celts. But he’s learned to speak Celtic just as Cottia has learned to speak Latin. And she’s an outsider in a Roman town. Sutcliff is always contrasting separate worlds and always exploring the ways in which they meet and mingle: the wild and the human; the barbaric and the civilized; the Celtic and the Roman. Her own name captures those contrasts and comminglings. Like her books, it embraces complexities of culture, language and religion. The name of the herb rosemary is ultimately from the pagan Latin ros marinus, meaning “sea-dew.” But it’s become assimilated to the name of Mary, mother of God in Christianity. Sutcliff is an Anglo-Saxon name from the great northern county of Yorkshire. It literally means “south cliff,” with assimilation of -th to the following consonant. And the “u” represents an older pronunciation, before the Great Vowel Shift that converted monophthongal oo into diphthongal ow in words like “south” and “mouth” and “drought.”

That took place after 1350. Except that it didn’t in some parts of northern Britain. You can still hear the ancient pure vowel in Scottish cities like Glasgow and English cities like Newcastle, where those words are “sooth,” “mooth,” “drooth.” And some Scots still pronounce the fricative consonant of gh, preserved in modern spelling but long vanished from the mouths of most speakers of English. The British Isles are rich and complex in all manner of ways: landscape and history, language and culture, flora and fauna. These green islands have been washed over by repeated waves of invasion, have retained the past here, mutated the past there, lost the past elsewhere. Rosemary Sutcliff was a winged wordsmith who could bring all of that richness and complexity to life with the magic of simple black marks on plain white paper.

Miniatures, not megalomania

But she was “winged” in two ways. To be winged can mean to possess and use wings or to be wounded in the wings, unable to fly. Both senses applied to Rosemary Sutcliff. She could vividly evoke the violent deeds of a cavalry charge or the valiant daring of chariot-racing in her writing, but she was in fact a cripple who was unable to ride or run or even leave the confines of a wheelchair. In early childhood she had been struck by Still’s disease or systemic-onset juvenile idiopathic arthritis, as modern medicine calls it. That’s an ugly collocation for an ugly condition that condemns its victims to chronic pain and confinement. I can still remember the shock I felt when I first saw that photograph of the adult Sutcliff in a wheelchair (see above). Her arms are stubbed by Still’s, her hands seem almost useless, and one shoulder is much smaller than the other. It seemed obscene that such a lively and light-winged writer should be trapped in such a pitiful and powerless body. But Sutcliff is smiling in the photograph. Her spirit is unbowed and she knows she has wings.

Nietzsche says “Nein!” to Marx

I’m reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche, another great White writer whose literary wings carried him to great heights and across vast distances, despite chronic illness and bodily infirmity. But Nietzsche had huge flaws and succumbed to megalomania and madness. Sutcliff never did. She isn’t just smiling in her photograph: she looks sensible. As she began her adult life, Sutcliff didn’t begin feeding megalomania but dedicated herself to miniatures. Like Beatrix Potter (1866–1943), another great English children’s writer, she first worked as an artist before she turned to literature. She was an only child like Potter too and like Potter she never had children of her own.

That must have been part of why both women chose to write for the children of others, conjuring the joys and wonders, the sorrows and sadness, of the world for boys and girls they would never meet. Potter is far more famous today, thanks in part to the way she combined words and images and to her more obvious humour. But I think Sutcliff was the better and more subtle writer. There’s an acute intelligence and insight in her books that most young readers will fully appreciate only when they return to the books as adults.

Autographic Eagle

It’s often disappointing to return to a childhood favorite like that. But not when the book is by Rosemary Sutcliff. She doesn’t condescend to her readers or try to soften the sorrow and suffering of the world. Unlike the past she conjured so well, sorrow and suffering were things she knew in the flesh. I didn’t know about her illness when I read her as a child; re-reading her as an adult, I can see the autobiography in her stories. There are constant themes of health shattered and hopes dashed, then of rehabilitation and happiness restored by hard work and unshaken will. In Eagle of the Ninth, her young protagonist Marcus looks forward to a long career in the legions, but is invalided out of his first command after being seriously wounded in a battle with rebellious Celtic tribesmen. He has to overcome pain and endure operations without anaesthetic before he’s able to ride a horse and seek adventure again. There’s autobiography and wish-fulfilment there. And there’s autobiographic symbolism in the quest that Marcus undertakes after his recovery. Sutcliff describes the genesis of the book like this in her foreword:

Sometime about the year 117 A.D., the Ninth Legion, which was stationed at Eburacum where York now stands, marched north to deal with a rising among the Caledonian tribes, and was never heard of again.

During the excavations at Silchester nearly eighteen hundred years later, there was dug up under the green fields which now cover the pavements of Calleva Atrebatum [Calleva of the Atrebates], a wingless Roman Eagle, a cast of which can be seen to this day in Reading Museum. Different people have had different ideas as to how it came to be there, but no one knows, just as no one knows what happened to the Ninth Legion after it marched into the northern mists.

It is from these two mysteries, brought together, that I have made the story of ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’. (The Eagle of the Ninth, foreword)

And the story is that a rumour comes to the civilized south telling of a Roman eagle honoured in the rites of a remote Celtic tribe beyond Hadrian’s wall. Invalided out of service and uncertain about his future when he hears the rumor, Marcus guesses that it was inspired by the lost eagle of his father’s old legion, now preserved and honored by the tribe that wiped out the Ninth Hispana. So he goes in quest of the eagle with his freed slave Esca, hoping to return to civilization with it and enable the legion to be reformed. He’s half successful, retrieving the eagle but unable to reform the legion. The eagle has lost its wings, after all. It can no longer fly. It’s aquila non alata, a wingless eagle. There’s important — and autobiographic — symbolism there that Sutcliff would pursue in two sequels, The Silver Branch (1957) and The Lantern Bearers (1959), the latter of which won the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction.

From Greek to Latin to Saxon

In The Lantern Bearers, there’s a Roman soldier who doesn’t befriend a slave but actually becomes a slave himself. He’s captured by some of the Saxon raiders tearing at the dying remnants of Roman Britain in the fifth century. The soldier is dark-headed Aquila, meaning Eagle, and he owes his life to a dolphin tattoo that he bears on one shoulder. The tattoo catches the eye of a golden-haired young Saxon, whose raiding party need a new oarsman. And so they enslave Aquila rather than kill him, taking him away to servitude far from home. He introduces his new masters to old Homer, when they belatedly find a scroll in one of their items of loot, a “bronze box beautifully and curiously enriched with blue and green enamels.” The scroll is a Latin translation of the ninth book of the Odyssey. After he persuades them not to burn it as mysterious and perhaps maleficent magic, Aquila translates the scroll again, turning it into the new tongue he’s learnt living amongst them.

They’re captivated by Homer’s winged words, flown from Greek to Latin to Saxon. A “fierce old warrior” feels kinship with the warrior-sailor Odysseus and tells Aquila: “Speak me more words of this seafarer who felt even as I did when I was young and followed the whale’s road.” Sutcliff is contrasting and commingling again: a literate Roman and illiterate Saxons; a southern story that delights a northern audience. But even as she’s celebrating the power of her own storytelling craft, she’s celebrating the magic of the written word. Homer was millennia dead even in Aquila’s day and he too had lived in a world without writing. But when his winged words were set down on papyrus, they became what the Roman poet Horace called aere perennius, “more lasting than bronze.” And as writing they would fly further than blind Homer — or many sighted Homers — could ever have dreamed.

Cut off, not connected

Homer’s words flew to Rosemary Sutcliff among countless others. They inspired her to create winged words of her own. Now Sutcliff herself is dead, following her heroes Homer and Kipling into whatever awaits us beyond Ianuae Mortis, the Gates of Death. But, like theirs, her winged words are still flying. And they’ll continue to take flight within the brain of whoever takes up one of her books. It’s just today that her words don’t fly as often as they should. For decades, her books have been connecting White British children with their ancestry and their history. But modern leftists want White British children to be cut off, not connected. Sutcliff is no longer a fashionable writer and leftists see her power to conjure the past for White British children as a danger, not a delight. After all, increasing numbers of children in Britain are neither White nor British. Leftists don’t value the past for its power to enrich and enlighten the present.

Alien faces, alien races: Rosemary Sutcliff was not writing for non-British children like these (leftist propaganda at the British National Health Service or NHS)

No, they value it for its power to breed either shame or resentment. Leftists want White children to feel shame about British history and non-White children to feel resentment. That aids the leftist project to destroy the West and rule the ruins. The wonderful books of Rosemary Sutcliff don’t aid that project, which is why her words are taking wing in the brains of fewer and fewer children. Yes, she was “disabled” but she didn’t center her identity on her misfortune. She didn’t distill bitterness and envy from her suffering or try to instill them in her readers. Sickness and suffering are often present in her stories, but they’re there to be transcended by her heroes and heroines.

“All along the boughs”

Mostly her heroes, because Sutcliff didn’t center her identity on her sex either. Something else that makes her books wholly unsuitable in leftist eyes is that she didn’t hate men or seek to subvert masculinity. Worse still, she didn’t hate Whites or Western civilization. Darting and dipping and hovering like a hummingbird, she saw and described civilization and barbarism from all sides, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Modern leftist education rejects her because her sympathies were too wide and her subtleties too skilful. And because her history was rooted in reality, not based on bollocks. Her books don’t support the absurdities of what I call Black Bullshit Month, which pretends that the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (145-211 AD) was Black because he was born in northern Africa. Indeed, Black Bullshit Month pretends that Severus was both Black and British, because he lived in Britain for a time.

When Rosemary Sutcliff died in 1992, that kind of nonsense hadn’t conquered British education and children’s literature wasn’t devoted to the worship of darkness in all senses — not the darkness of non-White migrants or the darkness of perverted ideologies. Sutcliff didn’t create Somali heroes or celebrate transgenderism. She didn’t pour poison into children’s brains. No, she conjured beauty and understanding in their brains instead. But she certainly knew darkness and evil. The stale pale males in her books experience suffering, cruelty and loss, then overcome all three in both body and spirit. And when their bright world is overwhelmed by the dark, they know that the dark will not reign for ever. That’s the central message of books like The Lantern Bearers. Roman Aquila is a soldier who became a slave then a soldier again, an eagle who’s winged, wingless, then winged again. And this is what the reader sees through his eyes in the closing words of the book:

He looked up at the old damson tree, and saw the three stars of Orion’s belt tangled in the snowy branches. Someone, maybe Ness [his Celtic wife], had hung out a lantern in the colonnade, and in the star-light and the faint and far-most fringe of the lantern glow it was as though the damson tree had burst into blossom; fragile, triumphant blossom all along the boughs.

Further reading

• Rosemary Sutcliff, the official website

• Celebration of Sutcliff at the Critic, which calls her a “writer of genius, capable of conveying the feelings and lives of those who lived in the distant past”

Agent Double Zero

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         After yet another assassination attempt on Donald Trump — or as The New York Times calls it, “what the FBI is calling an assassination attempt” — it’s time for Trump to hire Blackwater to do his security. (You can choose your own pronouns, but it’s up to the Times to decide if someone tried to assassinate you.)

            My last suggestion along these lines was this:

“Dear Bureau of Prisons: Please get Jeffrey Epstein to a supermax prison pronto, or the people who want him dead will make sure we never know the truth. ACT NOW!” — posted on Twitter, 1:05 a.m., July 25, 2019

They didn’t move him, and three weeks later, Epstein was dead. I’d rather not be right this time, although neither he nor Trump built the wall.

You may have noticed that, instead of taking readers through the facts that lead to my point, I began with the conclusion. Trump isn’t known for being a detailed reader, so I had to put it up front.

But here’s my reasoning.

Only in Hollywood movies are intelligence agencies repositories of wisdom, courage and derring-do. In real life, a Secret Service agent isn’t Clint Eastwood, matching wits with evil genius John Malkovich to save the president’s life, but a bum passed out drunk in bed with a Colombian whore hours before President Barack Obama arrives for an international summit.

Let’s review just a few of the protective branches’ greatest hits, starting with the CIA, the most falsely admired agency. If nothing else comes of this column, I’d at least like to reduce the number of ignoramuses attributing superpowers to the CIA, as if we’re talking about James Bond and not Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

CIA, aka the Most Discredited Intel Agency on the Planet:

The CIA didn’t see 9/11 coming, couldn’t locate Osama bin Laden for a decade, had no inkling the USSR was on the verge of collapse throughout the ’80s, and was stunned by the 1979 Iranian revolution.

This is all pretty common knowledge about an elite, top-secret agency with a billion-dollar budget, having been reported in major media outlets — e.g.:

— The New York Times, March 29, 1987: “The Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that the Soviet economy significantly improved last year, putting the agency at odds with some Western specialists.”

Months later, the USSR was bankrupt.

— The Washington Post, Dec. 8, 1985: “Five months before the downfall of the Shah of Iran, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA concluded that ‘Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.’ A month later the [Defense Intelligence Agency] asserted that ‘the shah is expected to remain actively in power over the next 10 years.’”

In short order, the shah was fleeing for his life as hundreds of Americans were taken hostage by Islamic lunatics.

            In another triumph for these all-knowing prophets, in 1999, NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by accident because the CIA had failed to update its addresses of foreign embassies.

            Among the many enemy spies the CIA didn’t notice in its own ranks was Aldrich Ames, whose betrayal led to the execution or imprisonment of dozens of Soviet sources. Despite the fact that Ames was a drunk, an adulterer and living well beyond his means, the CIA didn’t realize he was a Soviet spy for eight years. Hey, anybody can have a bad few decades.

And don’t forget that, during the 2020 presidential campaign, it was former CIA acting director Michael Morell who organized the letter signed by “51 intelligence officers” claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.”

The only thing provable about CIA agents is that they know less about the world than anyone who isn’t a CIA agent.

Which of these is your favorite FBI moment?

— A yearslong, multimillion-dollar Russia investigation instigated by a corrupt, Trump-hating FBI agent, who pushed the Hillary-supporting DOJ brass to sign off on multiple FISA warrants against American citizens, based on a nonsense “Russian dossier” compiled by someone being paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

— Shooting dead a woman holding her child, a 14-year-old boy, and a dog at Ruby Ridge.

— Incinerating more than 80 men, women and children to death in Waco, Texas (with assistance from crack ATF and DEA teams).

— Blowing off Phoenix FBI agent Ken Williams’ detailed memo two months before the 9/11 attack warning FBI higher-ups that a lot of Muslims were taking flight lessons, saying it looked like a “coordinated effort” by Osama bin Laden. Appalled by the agent’s Islamophobia, the bureau ignored his report.

— Clearing Islamic terrorist Omar Mateen shortly before he slaughtered 49 people at an Orlando nightclub.

— Refusing to follow up on repeated warnings about Parkland, Florida, mass shooter Nikolas Cruz.

— Dropping its investigation of recent school shooter Colt Gray because he told them his computer had been hacked.

At least under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI was competent. Today, the bureau is the Social Justice Warrior version of the Keystone Cops.

Secret Service:

Rounding out this very brief review of the crackerjack performance of U.S. protective agencies is the one in the news this week, the Secret Service.

It’s bad enough that a dozen agents engaged in the aforementioned drunken whoring in Colombia while allegedly doing “advance work” for Obama in 2012. But guess how they were caught? One of the agents got into a screaming match with a Cartagena prostitute over her payment. Suggestion for a new Secret Service motto: Immoral and Stupid.

The following year, Secret Service agents were found passed out in the hallway of a Netherlands hotel the day before Obama arrived, and two other agents drunkenly wrecked a car in the Florida Keys. After that, the service issued a new rule: Agents must be sober for 12 hours before the beginning of their shift protecting the president. Good to know.

At least in Florida this week, Secret Service agents noticed that someone was pointing a gun at Trump. In 2011, illegal alien Oscar Ortega-Hernandez riddled the White House with bullets, but when a Secret Service agent tried to respond, his supervisor ordered him to stand down, saying there had been no shots fired. The shooting was only discovered days later, when an alert housekeeper found glass all over the floor where Ortega-Hernandez had shot out a window.

Although there are plenty of impressive individuals within these agencies — like Ken Williams, blown off by his superiors — they’re trapped in the maw of a criminally incompetent federal government.

After two assassination attempts on Trump within three months, it’s time to stop believing in Hollywood fantasies and get Trump some real security. He should hire Blackwater today.

            COPYRIGHT 2024 ANN COULTER

Spencer J. Quinn on Counter-Currents: Cathy Young vs. Darryl Cooper

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Cathy Young vs. Darryl Cooper

In order for white Europeans to finally escape the hole they have dug for themselves, they must reevaluate the Second World War. This was the war in which Europe was conquered by the forces of liberal democracy coming from the west, and the forces of communism coming from east—two sides of the same globalist coin. Ultimately, whites were the big loser in that conflict, with over ten million needlessly slaughtered. But this was all for the good, we’ve been taught. This was all to crush a great evil, one we were told we’d do much better without. Only now, we are beginning to realize that we not doing any better without this so-called evil. With Europe and America being invaded by the Third World, and with this catastrophe being funded, enabled, and cheered on by the very inheritors of the victors of the Second World War, we’re beginning to discover an evil greater than the one we eradicated in 1945.

I would say reevaluating the Second World War ranks higher in importance than being versed in race realism, the Jewish Question, or white identity, as crucial as all of these things are. Fortunately, former Fox News personality and independent journalist Tucker Carlson is doing just this. Recently, he hosted historian and podcaster Darryl Cooper for an interview on X to discuss the Jonestown massacre and Cooper’s upcoming and sure-to-be-controversial project on WWII. Given the million-plus views and ten thousand comments their conversation has garnered, revisionist notions are suddenly, miraculously back in play in the American mainstream. As I listened to this engrossing podcast, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

Starting off, Carlson could not have praised Cooper more effusively—so much so that what followed will be impossible for him to walk back. Darryl Cooper, according to Carlson, is “the most important popular historian working in the United States today” thanks to his “relentless curiosity and honesty.” As it turns out, Cooper’s curiosity and honesty have led him to some rather scandalous opinions on the Second World War, which he correctly described as “the founding mythology of the order that we’re all living in.” You can say what you want about other historical events, but to deviate from the accepted narrative on this one is to violate some serious taboos. And one way to ensure a topic remains poorly understood is to slather it with taboos.

I mean, again, like a historical event like World War two, where I mean, the one rule is that you shall not do that. You shall not look at this topic and try to understand how the Germans saw the world. Like how the whole thing, from the First World War on up to the very end of the war, how these people might have genuinely felt like they were the ones under attack. That they were the ones being victimized by their neighbors and by all these, by the Allied powers. You know, and you can handle that with a sentence, you know, you can wave it off and say, well, you know, they’re justifying themselves, their rationalizing their evil, or whatever you want to say. But again, I think we’re getting to the point where that’s very unsatisfying . . .

So Cooper wishes to understand the German perspective regarding the war. That in and of itself is not terribly scandalous. Then again, never once did he say that the German perspective was necessarily correct or moral. He understands that there are layers upon layers here—nothing one can uncover in a two-hour podcast. But like a good historian, he also knows that demonizing one side of a conflict isn’t right.

And so if you start talking about the interwar period and how Weimar, the Weimar culture, you know, after the First World War led to something like, the rise of the National Socialists and why the people who embraced that movement did embrace it. . . . You know, you had this country, Germany, a sophisticated cultural super power. That was fine. And then they all turned into demons for a few years, and now they’re fine again. Like, that’s sort of the official story. And I think deep down, we all know that makes no sense.

If he refuses to demonize the German people, that’s one thing. But at least Cooper has the sense to demonize Adolf Hitler, right? Well, not so fast:

Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War. Now, he didn’t kill the most people. He didn’t commit the most atrocities[…] I think when you really get into it and tell the story right and don’t leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.

Cooper argues further that Hitler, after achieving victory over Poland, fired off peace proposals to France and England, begging them to rescind their war declaration. Hitler even flew planes over England to drop leaflets expressing Germany’s desire for peace. According to messages like these, Hitler not only wanted peace, he wanted England to remain strong—with all of its colonies intact—in order to thwart the great communist menace in the Soviet Union. All sadly fell on deaf ears.

The reason I resent Churchill so much for it is that he kept this war going when he had no way, he had no way to go back and fight this war. All he had were bombers. He was literally, by 1940, sending firebomb fleets, sending bomber fleets to go firebomb the Black Forest. Just to burn down sections of the Black Forest. Just rank terrorism, you know […] What eventually became the carpet bombing, the saturation bombing of civilian neighborhoods […] the purpose of which was to kill as many civilians as possible. And all the men were out in the field. All the fighting age men were out in the field. And so this is old people. It’s women and children. And they knew that.

Sort of like how the Allies starved 850,000 Germans—old people and children, mostly—during their naval blockade at the end of the First World War. Of course, the Germans remembered that. Of course, they would scoff at any Allied notions of human rights after that. One thing that Cooper does not mention however was that Churchill had been egged on by none other than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Washington. FDR had desperately wanted war with Germany and had pressured Churchill’s predecessor Neville Chamberlain during the late 1930s into provoking one—as it turned out, by propping up Poland with a “blank check.” According to Robert Stinnett in Day of Deceit FDR had goaded Japan into war for this very reason due to Japan’s alliance with Germany. And those long-range heavy bombers which Cooper mentions? They were manufactured for the very purpose of bombing German civilians by the supposed appeaser Chamberlain throughout 1938 and 1939. …

 

 

Antifa Prosecution Chokes at Trial; Virginia Attorney General Candidate Shannon Taylor’s Key Witness Proven Liar

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Charlottesville Antifa and their supporters at the University of Virginia and the Prosecutor’s office have finally gotten a little piece of what they deserve.

After seven years of specious lawsuits and criminal charges against dozens of men who dared to stand up to Antifa, the corrupt local government, and the University of Virginia (UVA), one judge has finally seen through Charlottesville’s campaign of lies.

On August 22, Judge H. Thomas Padrick finally dismissed the charges against Jacob Joseph Dix, a dashing 29-year-old truck driver from Ohio. Mr. Dix had been accused of “burning an object with intent to intimidate”—an absurd application of an unconstitutional law that only exists to harass Whites—for taking part in the tiki-torch procession on UVA’s campus on August 11, 2017.

At Mr. Dix’s trial June 4–6, his lawyer Peter Frazier convinced 8 out of 12 jurors to vote not guilty, resulting in a mistrial. This was a stunning outcome, given the bigotry and ignorance that prevails in Charlottesville. It speaks to the weakness of the prosecution’s case and the competence of the defense.

Before the trial even began, the case was in trouble. Both the original judge and the Albemarle prosecutor’s office (“Commonwealth’s Attorney” in Virginia’s propagandistic terminology) had to step aside for (highly likely) conflicts of interest.

Henrico County prosecutor Shannon Taylor was brought in. Ms. Taylor is currently running for Attorney General of Virginia. More on her later.

The Nature of Political Trials

Before I get into the details, you should be aware: as with all jury trials, the facts don’t really matter. Especially in political trials like that of Mr. Dix. What matters is lawyers’ ability to drive their points home to the jury. The point of a trial isn’t to scientifically determine the truth. It is to see which side is more convincing.

We haven’t gone so far from the old “trial by combat.” The only difference is that the winner isn’t the better swordsman, it’s the better wordsmith. Many jurors feel that whoever is more convinced of their own rightness will speak better and therefore must be in the right.

This is dangerous, because “liberal” careerists (like Shannon Taylor or Albemarle prosecutors Jim Hingeley and Lawton Tufts) are supremely convinced of their own rightness. They have no trouble making brazen and unfair attacks against a defendant because they are not of a philosophical disposition that cares about truth or rightness. They take the system’s morality as an assumption and fight for it.

That’s the way it is. There’s no point in hoping for more discerning juries or more fair-minded prosecutors. This is the game, and we have to play by their rules. Fight fire with fire.

With that in mind, let’s examine the key rhetorical points of each side.

The Defense

Defense lawyer Peter Frazier destroyed the credibility of the prosecution’s key witness, malicious Antifa ringleader Edward (“Emily”) Gorcenski. He took a strong moral position and argued clearly and effectively. He is responsible for the case’s eventual dismissal. There’s no doubt his overall framing won the case.

Emily G.’s Twitter photo, August 2017

He did so by arguing five main points:

1) The state has no evidence of malicious intent.

2) The defendant said things protected by the First Amendment; he didn’t hit or attack anyone.

3) The cops didn’t arrest anyone for carrying a torch. They didn’t tell anyone that carrying a torch was illegal, because they themselves didn’t think it was.

4) The statute does not even apply to the allegations.

5) Antifa was at fault. The planners tried to keep the march secret to avoid Antifa attacks. This is proven by the May 2017 tiki-procession in Charlottesville carried out by many of the same people. That one was secret. No antifa came. No violence happened.

Mr. Frazier cannot be commended enough for his excellent handling of the facts and his skill at cross-examination.

Antifa Goon Wrecked in Cross-Examination

I recently obtained the trial transcript—and it’s no surprise that the mainstream media did not report the details of this trial. Antifa ring-leader Edward Gorcenski was brutally humiliated in cross-examination. I winced reading it.

It culminated in this electrifying exchange:

[Frazier]: You saw him for about five seconds in the dark seven years ago and you’re here to say in court that this is that man?

[Gorcenski] Yes. It was lit. It was lit by street lights. It was lit by torch light. To the best of my knowledge that is that person.

[Frazier] Based on what you’ve read on the Internet.

[Gorcenski] Based on what I saw on the Internet. Based on what I investigated. Based on the news reports that I have read that this is that man. [my emphasis]

[Frazier] No further questions, Judge.[1]

The entire case is hearsay! The prosecution’s primary witness could not even say that he SAW the defendant there. And this case made it through multiple motions to dismiss, it had the first judge thrown off for conflicts of interest, it had the whole Albemarle prosecutor’s office thrown off for conflicts of interest, AND STILL it went to trial! Albemarle County Virginia is a bloody joke. Totally abusive. Outrageous.

How about we put the prosecutors and their moneymen and the whole UVA administration on trial? That would actually be fair.

But that was not the only humiliation. There’s more. MORE! Gorcenski admitted to releasing the time and place of the tiki-procession to “maybe four or five” journalists.[2]

He also admitted to being an FBI informant:

[Gorcenski] There was a lot going on that day, and, in fact, the FBI had contacted me that day and we had talked about the rally as well.

[Frazier] The FBI contacted you?

[Gorcenski] Yes.[3]

He claimed that this was merely “because as a media organizer the goal was to get the community message out.”[4] But it’s obvious from the rest of his testimony that his real goal was to ensure that his political enemies were denied their right to free assembly.

Frazier also confronted Gorcenski with this Tweet that he wrote just four days before the tiki-procession:

“Biological essentialism is a fascist vector, and fascism must be crushed. Fascism is an act of first violence and violence is justified to stop it.” Edward Gorcenski (Emily G.) on Twitter, August 7, 2017[5]

So he defines another position—that biology is central to who we are—as “fascist” by its very nature, and thus, violence is justified against people whom he deems to hold such beliefs.

It is thus fair to deduce that Mr. Gorcenski’s intent on August 11th was to attack his political enemies. And furthermore that his contact with the FBI and with the media was for the purpose of inciting his Antifa comrades. It would not be the only example of Antifa-FBI collusion.

This argument could have been made more aggressively if the judge had allowed other Gorcenski tweets to be entered into evidence, for instance:

“One story that hasn’t been told about #Charlottesville is how our intel networks dramatically outclassed both the alt-right’s and the cops’.” August 19 2017

Ok, so yes. Antifa is engaged in extrajudicial mass-surveillance of its political enemies. It does the dirty work that even the FBI cannot be seen doing.

At another point in the cross-examination Gorcenski very nearly admitted to trying to manipulate the prosecutor’s office for his own political ends:

[Frazier] I said can you explain why at no point in any of those discussions [with the police] that you didn’t—that you didn’t mention Jacob Dix?

[Gorcenski] Yes, I can explain that. The case—the Commonwealth Attorney indicated to me that— 

[Frazier] Which Commonwealth Attorney

[Gorcenski] The previous Commonwealth Attorney for Albemarle County, Robert Tracci indicated to me—

[Prosecutor]: Objection—

THE COURT: Sustained[6]

Very interesting. So Gorcenski was lobbying the former prosecutor to bring charges against his political enemies? Was he also lobbying the current prosecutor, the one who actually brought the charges?

Yes! He didn’t say so in court, but he has elsewhere. On a podcast Gorcenski bragged that he had convinced the prosecutor to bring these charges against people like Mr. Dix.[7]

I’m gonna go ahead and suggest that this is yet more evidence for my theory that Antifa, UVA and the Albemarle County prosecutor’s office conspired to bring these fake and evil prosecutions. And that the prosecutors are covering it up.

Let’s keep reading!

[Frazier] You didn’t mention Jacob Dix’s name to those police any time, did you?

[Gorcenski] I can’t recall if I did or did not. At one point I submitted a dossier of evidence to UVA PD that included some of the people that had been identified in the torch march. I do not—

[Frazier] Not identified by you.

[Gorcenski] Not identified by me, but just general. Some of them identified by me, but some of them generally. And I don’t recall off the top of my head whether or not Jacob Dix was in there. But if I were to guess—

TAYLOR: Object—

[Gorcenski] —I would say that he was not.[8]

Prosecutor Taylor then objects to her own witness for being “unresponsive.” LOL. That’s not why you objected, you liar! Your witness was too responsive. He was giving away the game! He was accidentally revealing an extrajudicial espionage operation by Antifa to push the courts into prosecuting political enemies.

Why do these judges always have to interrupt when things get interesting?

Edward Gorcenski’s disastrous testimony ruined the case. The defense decided against even calling a single witness, because they were so confident that the jury would see through it. And, despite the media’s lies about the Charlottesville 2017 tiki-procession, their confidence was justified. Eight jurors voted for acquittal.

Prosecutor Taylor is now running for Virginia Attorney General. Much of her campaign propaganda focuses on her record of “fighting extremists.” She even included footage of the tiki-procession in a campaign ad.

She must have known that she choked at trial. She sent her underlings to Mr. Dix’s motion-to-dismiss hearing, knowing all was lost.[9]

Like all politicians in democracy, she didn’t care about doing the right thing. She wanted to put Jacob Dix in prison to further her political career.

The Defense’s One Weak Concession

There is one part of Mr. Frazier’s rhetoric that I must respectfully critique. In his opening statement, he excused Antifa for discovering and leaking the time and place of the tiki-torch procession. This leak was the only reason that any conflict happened in the first place. As usual, the Alt-Right tried to keep the event secret to avoid Antifa harassment and violence. As had happened many times before.

Speaking of the “left-wing counter-protesters” (i.e., Antifa), Mr. Frazier said of Antifa:

Word got out and they posted it on a leftwing website saying, hey, something’s going down at UVA tonight, organize, let’s—let’s counter-protest. … That’s a classic counterprotest and they did it specifically because they knew the torch demonstration was coming. And, again, God bless them. Like they are totally allowed to do that.[10]

I can only assume that he said this as a rhetorical concession. “See, I’m a fair guy, I’m playing fair.” In a just country, this would be a good stance. Perhaps even today with some jurors, this might work. I do not doubt Mr. Frazier’s good intent, I only criticize this tactic, because it gives away too much to an evil and immoral prosecution.

It is not Antifa’s “right” to be spies and traitors. That’s what this person was. They treacherously worked their way into a position to find where the protest would happen. They then published that information with the intent that violent thugs would attack us. Their purpose was to deny us the right of free assembly.

And given Mr. Gorcenski’s revelations about his contacts with the complicit FBI and the media, who is to say that one of their agents did not leak that information to Antifa?

This would fit the pattern. When Antifa shows up, there is a fight. When the Alt-Right shows up, there is not. This has been going on for years. To suggest otherwise is obviously untrue. This needs to be drilled into people’s heads—especially jurors. Antifa is a malicious and terroristic nationwide gang. Anytime they exercise “their rights,” it is only ever to strip everyone else of theirs.

If it had not been for that—for Antifa’s violent history—we would have simply announced the torch-vigil openly and invited others to counter-protest. We did just that in April 2017 at a protest at the White House (against Trump’s bombing of Syria). Of course, masked Antifa goons stalked us, screamed at us, threatened us, and attacked us. So sorry if we didn’t send them an invitation to the torch-march a few months later.

That people have to arrange secret protests is only because of the U.S. government’s toleration of this domestic terrorist group. Those are the criminals. Antifa, its corporate backers, and the authorities who make it impossible for Americans to demonstrate openly, because they make it impossible for us to meet Antifa’s force with justified force of our own. In a fair fight—or even in a rather imbalanced one—Americans beat Antifa scum.

This has to be repeated. It is not good enough to skirt around the Antifa problem. You have to confront it head-on. It starts in rhetoric. Then the courts. Then the streets. That progression mirrors the personal preparation required: first in spirit, then in mind, then in body.

The Prolix and Mendacious Prosecution

Edward Gorcenski’s awful testimony wasn’t prosecutor Taylor’s only problem.

Her argument was trash. At least in terms of logic. There is no point in discussing her laborious and twisted reasoning. Her only strategy was to flood the jury with confusing and even contradictory facts and then bamboozle them with word-tricks—typical of politically motivated, careerist prosecutors.

Her closing argument centered on one line: “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

This was a good argument for her, because it could easily trick the jury. She was essentially saying “rights have limitations,” as if that could somehow prove the defendant guilty. She talked about how you can’t scream “fire” in a movie theater. Duh. Everybody learned that in middle-school. Her goal was to attack a position that no one on our side ever took, and thereby to dupe the jury. It was a strawman argument.

Contrary to her claims, no one on our side was arguing that “free assembly” and “free speech” allow you to form a mob, mask up, carry weapons, and scream death-threats outside someone’s house. The defense was not arguing that or anything like it. In fact, the only people who have ever done that are… oh right. Antifa.

No, Shannon, you disingenuous harpy. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. In fact, it provided for its own dissolution. Because the founding fathers—not being like today’s hack-politicians who worship “the Constitution” as immutable—were modest enough to assume that it would not last forever.

However, in the modern (frankly, Jewish) interpretation—the Constitution IS INDEED a suicide pact. Just not in the way that Prosecutor Taylor meant.

It is a suicide pact for White Americans.

To wit:

1) The U.S. government’s multi-billion-dollar domestic espionage apparatus makes a mockery of your Fourth Amendment right to “be secure in your possessions” and free from “unreasonable search and seizure.” This apparatus is controlled by, and run primarily in the interests of, American Jews.

2) The citizen is forced to pay for endless, undeclared wars, which—since 1945 alone—have killed tens of millions of people with whom Americans have no quarrel. These wars—including now the ones in the Ukraine and Palestine—are big fat milk cows for often-Jewish financiers and cynical war profiteers. They are justified and promoted by the press, lobbyists (AIPAC, JINSA) and “neoconservative” paid hacks in the elite media (Max Boot, Michelle Goldberg, Jennifer Rubin, Bret Stephens) and in the Biden administration (Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Ukraine war architect Victoria Nuland). It should go without saying that Jewish influence is heavy in all of those areas.[11]

3) We are also forced to pay for millions of racial aliens to settle in our homes, murder our sons and rape our daughters—while powerful Jews and their gentile lackeys live in luxury in New York, DC and Los Angeles. Jews have been instrumental in bringing this about.

4) Cops and soldiers kneel while Jewish-corporate Antifa riot and beat and kill people. Conditions in the streets have been set by Jewish influence on police policy, favoring Antifa and criminals and brutalizing normal people.

The Constitution’s only purpose today is to support and justify Jewish rule.

This cannot be undone by going back to the values of 1776. The emphasis on individual rights and freedoms has led to the domination of money and greed. It has ripped our people away from their inborn sense of community and responsibility to others. It has crippled us in our fight to regain our own freedom. It has degraded our moral sense.

Americans’ attachment to this long-dead Constitution is inexcusable. The fixation on money, greed and personal comfort has become outright satanic.

We need a new constitution that puts community first—racial community—and individual freedom second. That is the socialist way. And it should not be hard to convince people of that in this supposedly Christian country.

This Jewish-dominated political order of bribery and blackmail must be destroyed. There is no alternative.

Happy but not Satisfied

Judge Padrick’s dismissal is too little, too late. He should have taken responsibility and dismissed the charges months ago. The fact that this politically motivated charge ever got to trial is itself an outrage.

If Americans are ever going to free themselves, we have to learn from this. While we should be happy for Mr. Dix, we should not be satisfied. This outcome was not good enough. We demand more.

The fundamental problem in our country is not a lack of arguments, but a lack of moral conviction. Like political prosecutors, we all need to be uncompromising. No defensive remarks, no apologies, no concessions. Stake out the moral high-ground and force them to assail you there.

You need to internalize that. It isn’t your political opinions that are “racist” and “repugnant.” It’s the Jews’. They are by far the most powerful faction in American politics. They are therefore responsible for the deplorable condition of our people and our country. For all the murders and wars and fentanyl and money-scams and depression and hopelessness.

You didn’t do that. They did. And worst of all, by censorship, doxing and intimidation, they have avoided having to answer for their deeds.

Jacob Dix should be commended for having the guts to see this through to the end. Peter Frazier should also be commended as the first lawyer in Virginia to step up and do the right thing. And do it well. That took the kind of bravery that far too few people have shown. Getting the case dismissed was a small, but important victory.

The next trial is that of Augustus Invictus on October 8 through 11. If you are interested in helping him and the other Charlottesville defendants, you should donate to the Free Expression Foundation. You could mention that you would like your donation to prioritize filing subpoenas against Antifa and their UVA backers.

For anyone to be brought up on charges for standing against those powers is an outrage. The whole U.S.-Jewish power-elite is evil. Antifa is evil. Charlottesville is evil.

In a just country, Jacob Dix would not be on trial, but Edward Gorcenski, the UVA gang of pseudo-academics and liars, and the Albemarle County prosecutor’s office, most especially that corrupt sneak Jim Hingeley and his attack-dog, Lawton Tufts. And also their money-backers, billionaires Sonjia Smith and George Soros and Soros’ lapdog Tom Perriello.

And ultimately, that is our goal. Not to beat these monstrous prosecutions. But to put the prosecutors on trial.

Gregory Conte is an activist on behalf of the White Race and is the author of Sieg Heil: German for Beginners.

 

[1] Dix trial transcript pg 183, 11 to 21, emphasis added.

[2] Ibd. pg 149 line 20 to 152.

[3] Ibd. pg 148 line 1 to 6.

[4] Ibd. pg 152 7 to 8.

[5] see also Dix trial transcript pg 175 line 22 et seq.

[6] Dix trial transcript pg 180, line 19 et seq., emphasis added

[7] see here. 46:56 in podcast transcript, 53:00-53:20 in audio.

[8] Dix trial transcript pg 181 line 9-21, emphasis added

[9] Dix motion to dismiss hearing transcript, August 22, 2024, pg 2

[10] Dix trial transcript pg 24, 13-15, pg 25 line 8-11.

[11] On Jewish neoconservatives: see Kevin MacDonald, “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement.”

Ron Unz on the Carlson-Cooper Interview, World Wars I and II, Media Censorship, etc.

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This is lengthy but important article on many issues that the media-academic establishment polices intensely. Well worth reading. Basically agreeing with Cooper on much of his statements, including Churchill as psychopath acting in order to fuel his profligacy,  defending David Irving’s scholarship, adding Franklin Roosevelt to the list of villains because of his desire for war in order to turn the U.S. economy around.

“American Pravda: Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper, and Holocaust Denial, by Ron Unz – The Unz Review