Remembrances for October - 2025

 

Dear friends, if you have time, please pray for these members of the Southern family on the day they reposed.  Many thanks.

But one may ask:  ‘What good does it do to pray for the departed?’  An answer is offered here:  https://orthochristian.com/130608.html

Along with prayers and hymns for the departed:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6je5axPodI

3 Oct.

Henry Hughes of Port Gibson, Mississippi.  He did a little of everything:  lawyer, sociologist, State senator, soldier.  Some of his ideas are no longer of interest, but his vision of an economy that looks and functions like a family is still worthy of consideration.

https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/henry-hughes/

His book, Treatise on Sociology:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000000449458&view=1up&seq=5

7 Oct.

Edgar Allen Poe of Virginia, one of the South’s finest writers.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/poe-of-virginia/

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/822/edgar-allan-poe/photo

8 Oct.

Norbert Rillieux of New Orleans, greatly improved the sugar-refining process.

https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/norbertrillieux.html

12 Oct 1812

Andrew Bryan, founded the first black Baptist church in Savannah, Georgia, and was a tireless preacher to other Africans in his region of Dixie.

https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/andrew-bryan-1737-1812/

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2p28.html

12 Oct.

Gen Robert Edward Lee, our dear and loving father.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/ten-things-you-dont-know-about-robert-e-lee/

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/the-real-robert-e-lee/

23 Oct.

Chief George Washington Harkins, leader of the Choctaw tribe who led them along the Trail of Tears from Mississippi to Oklahoma.  His memorable farewell to the people of Mississippi may be read here:

https://www.ushistory.org/documents//harkins.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Harkins

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_removal#/media/File:Trails_of_Tears_en.png

His son David Harkins served as a Lt Col in the Confederate Army as part of the Choctaw Mounted Rifles and also served as a statesman in Choctaw politics:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/18910347/david-folsom-harkins

29 Oct.

Gen Nathan Bedford Forrest, a fine general and one of Dixie’s folk heroes.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/nathan-bedford-forrest-and-southern-folkways/

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/bust-hell-wide-open/

29 Oct.

Clarence Jordan, another recent Southern agrarian, founder of the Koinonia Farm in Georgia.  Also a preacher and a defender of black folks during the turmoil of the Civil Rights era, which made him and his Farm a target of violent attacks.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/clarence-jordan-and-the-southern-tradition/

29 Oct.

Sir Walter Raleigh, helped establish one of the earliest colonies in the South on Roanoke Island; he also found time for writing poetry and prose and for military service.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Walter-Raleigh-English-explorer

Some of his poetry is here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sir-walter-ralegh

29 Oct.

Joel Sweeney of Virginia, he popularized the banjo inside and outside of the South.

http://www.cgim.org/sweeneyclan/misc/musical.html

Also, to celebrate some of the saints of October from the South’s Christian inheritance of various lands, please visit these pages:

https://southernorthodox.org/orthodox-saints-for-dixie-october/

https://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/2020/11/happy-feast-for-saints-of-october.html

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘Reinvigorating State Power in the US Senate’

 

Donald Trump’s victory in the election for the federal presidency has provoked bold claims of a sweeping political realignment in the States:

‘The recent political landscape has been shaken to its core, revealing a seismic shift that has emerged as a result of the latest elections. The transformative power of the MAGA movement has taken center stage, with an unprecedented demonstration of electoral prowess across the nation. What transpired is nothing short of a political paradigm shift that could redefine American politics for generations to come.’¹

If this sounds familiar to anyone, he is not imagining things.  We heard nearly the exact same claims 20 years ago when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in the presidential election, which was similarly touted as ‘the most important election in the history of the US.’  For example, a fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, in his analysis of the Bush victory, wrote in 2005:

‘The fact that the Democratic Party seems both unwilling to accept any change in the big government programs of the New Deal or to compromise on what seems to be a radical secularist agenda, places it at a severe disadvantage in competing with the Republicans. Thus, the polarization of the electorate–much lamented by pundits and many in the media–has in this analysis been salutary for the Republican Party. The “bold colors” that Reagan called for when he urged the Republican Party to state its positions clearly seem to have attracted more support than they’ve lost. Although self-identified Republicans do not yet form a larger group than self-identified Democrats, they appear to have what might be called a working conservative majority of the electorate.

‘ . . . A serious recession, a major corruption scandal like Watergate, or a successful terrorist attack could result in an electoral revolt that strips the Republicans of their dominance temporarily. However, barring events of this kind, and assuming the Democrats remain captives of the left, the results of the 2004 presidential election seem consistent with a trend toward the Republican Party that has all the earmarks of the early stages of a long-term political realignment.’²

Well, an event ‘of this kind’ did happen:  The Iraq War became a quagmire, the Democrats won in the 2006 congressional mid-term elections because of dissatisfaction over that, and all of Bush’s grand promises to increase freedom at home through the privatization of Social Security, etc., dissolved into the stagnant air of the Chesapeake swamp – an atmosphere heavy with an abundance of broken promises to ‘the people.’

To the extent that Donald Trump can actualize any of the promises he has made – to secure the border, deport illegal aliens, eliminate the federal Dept of Education, and so on – we wish him the best.  But anyone who thinks this is the end of progressive/Leftist power in DC is deluded.  The Democratic Party’s wandering in the political wilderness after their ‘crushing defeat’ in 2004 lasted all of two years.  How long till the spectators of the US political circus get bored with the Trump Show and decide to change direction again?  Time will tell.

Early resistance has already been announced by the governors of Massachusetts, California, and Illinois.  We suspect that other Blue States and cities will join them, which will reinforce the reality that United States are not ‘one nation, indivisible’ but the confederation of separate nations they always have been.

Consolidation of all the States into one vast superstate governed exclusively by the federal apparatus in DC has been one of the greatest fears of the more perceptive statesmen of the US from the beginning.³  The rebellion of the Blue States against the incoming Trump regime is a tacit admission that even they agree on some level with their conclusions.

It is necessary, then, to strengthen those parts of our political system that allow the States to preserve the autonomy that is their birthright.

One of the wisest provisions of the Philadelphia charter of 1787 in this regard is the United States Senate.  The original mode of electing the senators, by the State legislatures, guaranteed that the States, acting in their capacities as independent nations (i.e., sending ambassadors to the federal city), would be able to directly influence the proceedings of the new coordinating government.  This would safeguard the States in various ways, even to the point of being able to bring the federal government to a complete end by not sending senators to DC:

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/reinvigorating-state-power-in-the-us-senate/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘Obscene Urban-Rural Power Disparities Hampering Revivalist Political Victories’

 

The results of the 2024 elections continue to generate lots of important news stories, but one that has not gotten any headlines thus far really ought to be glaring at us from above the fold:  the ridiculous disparities in political power between urban and rural counties (parishes for those in Louisiana).

The attention of most people has understandably been focused primarily on the federal presidential race, so we will begin our analysis of the power disparities there.

Donald Trump won both Texas and Wisconsin – the first by a fairly wide margin of the popular vote and the second by a very narrow margin.  But if we look more closely, Trump’s victory was a great deal larger than it appears in both States (all data below comes from NBC News’s 2024 election pages).

In Texas, he won with 56.2% to Kamala Harris’s 42.4% of the popular vote.  Yet Harris won only 12 counties to Trump’s 242 – an astounding difference that is not reflected at all in the popular vote.  Trump’s victory in the county totals comes to 95.3% to Harris’s 4.7%.  Such differences should be taken into account in State-wide elections (we will enlarge upon that below).

In Wisconsin, Trump squeaked by Harris in the popular vote, 49.6% vs 48.8%.  But he trounced her in the county vote, winning 59 to Harris’s 13, making Trump’s county victory in this State 81.9% with Harris taking only 18.1%.

Similarly wide gaps show up in the presidential contest in other States, too – Michigan, Minnesota, Georgia, Oregon, etc.

And this chasm between popular vote totals and county vote totals becomes even more absurd in other State-level elections.

There were a number of ballot initiatives in the States to be decided on November 5^th.  Those dealing with abortion received the most attention.  Because of that, we will limit our analysis of them to the abortion ballot measures.

In Montana, the pro-abortion initiative won with 57.3% of the popular vote to 42.7%, a solid majority.  But the initiative actually failed to win approval in a majority of counties:  Only 24 voted in favor, with 32 voting against, making a roughly equal percentage of counties against:  57.1%.

In Missouri things begin to look even more ludicrous.  A ‘right to abortion’ amendment passed with 51.7% of the votes in favor to 48.3% against.  But get this folks – only 10 counties out of 114 voted in favor of this amendment to enshrine a right to rip apart babies in the womb.  Thus an abysmally small 8.8% of counties decided the outcome on this terribly important issue.

But Nebraska, if one can believe it, is worse than Missouri.  The outcome is positive – a pro-life stance prevailed in both ballot measures (glory to God!) – but the influence of just a few counties was almost enough to change that.  The right to abortion initiative failed, 51.2% of the popular vote against and 48.8% for.  But only 4 counties voted in favor of this initiative vs 89 against, and this nearly brought a win; that is, only 4.3% of counties nearly made abortion an uncontestable right in Nebraska.  Likewise with the amendment to limit abortions to within the first trimester:  It won, 55.3% to 44.7% (popular vote).  In this contest, only 2 counties voted against vs 91 for, which means that an outlandishly tiny 2.1% of the counties put this measure within reach of defeat.

South Dakota, Nevada, New York, and Florida also had striking urban-rural splits on abortion measures.

The old federal provision that counted each slave as 3/5 of a free voter evoked loud howls of protest and outrage in the past.  Yet some of the rural counties that we looked at above haven’t even got that much voting power when contrasted with their urban counterparts.  In the last ballot measure of Nebraska that was discussed, each of the 91 rural counties had only 0.14/5 of the voting power as each of the two urban counties, a ratio that is much worse than that of the slaves.  That is quite a heavy punishment to bear for simply living in the peaceful fields and hollers of the countryside.

With all this mind, it is imperative that two things be done to protect rural counties, the bulwarks of conservative habits and beliefs, from being made totally subservient to their urban counterparts.  . . .

The rest may be read here:

https://thehayride.com/2024/11/garlington-obscene-urban-rural-power-disparities-hampering-revivalist-political-victories/

Or here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20241123000028/https://identitydixie.com/2024/11/13/obscene-urban-rural-power-disparities-persist-in-the-states/

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘Viewing the US Elections through a Christian Lens’

 

Donald Trump’s election victory on 5 November 2024 has set many tongues a-wagging, including many belonging to Christians.  There are those who are overly angry about his re-election, like this fellow, ‘Bishop’ Talbert Swan of Massachusetts:

‘“The election of Donald Trump threatens the hard-won rights of marginalized communities. Under his leadership, we risk seeing setbacks for black Americans, immigrants, women, and the disabled as he empowers policies rooted in bigotry and exclusion,” he wrote on X.’

No doubt he would make for pleasant company over a cup of tea.  But we digress.

There are also those who are a little over-elated over Trump’s win, like these folks:

‘Supporters of President-elect Donald Trump praised God after the election, belting out the hymn “How Great Thou Art” after Trump’s historic victory.

‘“Witnessing this as I left the Trump victory party moved me to tears,” conservative commentator Lisa Boothe, host of The Truth with Lisa Boothe, said, sharing a video to social media showing Trump supporters coming together, belting out the hymn in unison.’

A Protestant pastor in Texas, Josh Howerton, however, hit many of the right notes in what he said:

‘Give thanks. Our nation was given an undeserved mercy last night, and it is a window for repentance (more on that later). No Christian anywhere should’ve supported the policy platform that was (mercifully) defeated last night and saying that should never have been controversial. In fact, it should prompt *deep* reflection about what happened to the US church in the last ~20 years that made it controversial for a pastor to say that. It is not wrong to celebrate and give thanks today for being spared from something our rebellious nation deserved. If you have kids, they need to see you celebrate because it trains their hearts! “When wicked things perish, there are shouts of joy” — Prov 11:10

‘ . . . Pray. Not only because we are commanded to pray for our governing leaders (1 Tim 2:1), but because of the situation. We elected Jehu (a flawed leader who defeated a greater evil) not Josiah (a righteous leader who led national revival), and that comes with risks. The command to “trust not in princes” (Psalm 146:3) means there is Someone 10 trillion times greater than a President and something 10 billion times greater than an election that we should ache and hunger for — an outpouring of the Spirit in our generation.’

As Pastor Josh hinted at, Trump’s victory is a reprieve from the acceleration of the demonic anti-human agenda that seeks to erase the image of God in man, and basically anything related to good traditions, through transgenderism and other horrific acts.

So far, so good.  On the surface, Trump’s victory looks positive for Christians.  However, when one delves deeper, problems begin to show themselves, and not only with Mr Trump, who was not the only one on the ballot on 5 November. 

Pepe Escobar reveals one of the chief problems with Trump – his alliance with the Zionist war-mongers:

 . . .

The rest may be read here:

https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/viewing-us-elections-through-christian-lens

Or here, in Russian:

https://katehon.com/ru/article/hristianskiy-vzglyad-na-vybory-v-ssha

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!