Feminism, Socialism, and the Struggle for New Heights

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Feminism, Socialism, and the Struggle for New Heights

Why would a Soviet-led expedition of eight women climbers prefer to die, in the worst storm that hit Lenin Peak in twenty five years, rather than accept help from fellow male climbers?

Not considered steep or technical, but nonetheless very high at 7,134 meters (23,406 feet), situated within the Pamir Mountain range at the Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan border. Lenin Peak is subject to harsh, unstable weather conditions. It is known by climbers for its strong winds, frosty temperatures, with sections of moderately steep ice. At such a high altitude the weather can turn very suddenly with an additional risk from avalanches for those ascending or descending. The peak is the highest mountain in the Trans-Alai range. This combination of changeable weather and high altitudes has resulted in the deaths of many of its climbers…

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Germar Rudolf, Revisionism, and The Angel of Auschwitz: Part Two

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Germar Rudolf, Revisionism, and The Angel of Auschwitz: Part Two

Having dealt with what is undoubtedly the biggest weapon in the mainstream Holocaust propaganda campaign, namely Auschwitz (once referred to in this context by David Irving as “the great battleship Auschwitz,” with the major task for revisionists being, “Sink the Auschwitz!”), Germar Rudolf moves on to look at other camps, beginning with the so-called “Operation Reinhardt” camps, the terminology used by mainstream writers for the alleged systematic extermination of Jews in three “pure extermination camps” in eastern Poland, namely Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibór. Rudolf asserts that this claim of mass murder is wrong…

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The Guinea Pig Speaks

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The Guinea Pig Speaks

In one of my numerous podcasts, I announced that I was a guinea pig in a social experiment which had been kept a secret from me for my entire life. The name of that experiment was social engineering. It began shortly after the Allied victory in World War II by driving my family out of our ethnic neighborhood in Philadelphia, and it eventually drove my generation insane with a combination of sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll. The one thing that remained constant during this period of time was the silence of the social engineers and the ignorance of the guinea pigs who had been the unwitting recipients of their ministrations. The author who writes under the pseudonym of Margaret Clare Devlin has done the baby boomer generation a favor by breaking that silence in a way that is no less shocking than it would have been if a lab rat had stood up to the scientist who was experimenting on it and said, “Cut it out” or, better, “I know what you’re doing, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” After a lifetime spent as part of an unnamed experiment which wrecked her life and the lives of everyone in her family, one of the guinea pigs finally figured out what was going on and decided to tell her story in all of its gruesome detail. Boomers’ Families springs from the Catholic tradition which Augustine founded when he wrote his Confessions and Thomas Merton resurrected for Americans when he wrote The Seven Storey Mountain. It’s required reading for every baby boomer whose life got ruined by the enemies no one ever warned him against in an undeclared culture war whose main strength was that the victims didn’t know that war was being waged against them.

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The Timing Behind the Attack on Salman Rushdie

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The Timing Behind the Attack on Salman Rushdie

On Friday, August 12, a 24-year-old New Jersey resident by the name of Hadi Matar stormed the stage in western New York where the Anglo-Indian author Salman Rushdie was scheduled to speak and stabbed him 15 times before he was subdued by a security guard and members of the audience.1 The assault was immediately labeled “an assault on freedom of thought and speech”2 and Rushdie was praised as “an inspirational defender of persecuted writers and journalists across the world.”

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Do Jews Count?

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Do Jews Count?

Any lingering regard I had for David Baddiel disappeared back in 2014. That was the year his first children’s book was published. Writing books for children is the last – but one – refuge of the washed-up “alternative” comedian. I have a particular loathing for children’s books written by alternative comedians, washed-up or otherwise. With titles like The Parent Agency, The Boy Who Could Do What He Liked and Head Kid, it was painfully obvious that in rehashing his “alternative” comedy schtick for schoolchildren, this pin-up boy of the 1990’s “comedy is the new rock n’ roll” generation thought it would be a good idea to impose on the children of England the jaded revolutionary politics with which the grown-ups of England are becoming increasingly fed up. With this deeply held prejudice I decided to read Jews Don’t Count, at which point I discovered that David Baddiel had reinvented himself again – this time as cultural commissar, the last refuge of the washed-up alternative comedian….

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Ratzinger and the German Problem

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Ratzinger and the German Problem

In an article which appeared recently in the National Catholic Register, Father Raymond J. de Souza announced that the Church had a “German problem.”1 The indisputable evidence for this problem could be found in the results of the German synod, which announced that the main problem facing the Church lay in lack of tolerance for sexual deviance. Whether that was construed as a celibate clergy, prohibitions against the divorced and remarried receiving communion, or disapproval of homosexuality, the German “Synodal Weg,” made it clear that it was the Church which had to change, not the Germans who had acquired a lot of bad habits over the past half century. The flagrant use of Church structures to undermine Church teaching provoked outrage among a group of “more than 70 bishops—led by four cardinals from three continents”—who “issued an open ‘fraternal letter’ to the bishops of Germany stating that ‘the potential for schism … will inevitably result’ if they do not repent of their ‘Synodal Path.’”

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The Sybaritic Synod Part 1: Gay Mafia Rising

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The Sybaritic Synod Part 1: Gay Mafia Rising

In an exquisite example of Providence’s comedic wit, Pope Francis announced the self-referentially named Synod on Synodality two years ago during the annus horribilis. Last year “the synodal process” began slouching its way toward Rome. This October, the world’s dioceses will begin the process of tabulating and synthesizing the results of their listening sessions. In October of next year, the world’s bishops will gather to be midwives at the birth of what has already been hailed as the newest “new Pentecost” (yes, really).3 What is the Synod on Synodality? What implications does it have for an already divided and ailing Church?

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The Dangers of Beauty

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The Dangers of Beauty

Desert Island Discs is 80 years old this year. The BBC Radio 4 favorite owes a great deal of its enduring popularity to the simple perfection of its interview form. To make desert island existence more endurable, each guest is permitted eight pieces of music, one book and one luxury. The same two books are given to every guest — the Bible and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Each guest gets to choose a third. When you, dear reader, get your D.I.D. 45 minutes of fame, may I suggest that you choose E. Michael Jones’ latest book. If you insist, as the ideal complement to the Bible and the Bard, to go for one of Jones’ other tomes — any one of which will double very nicely as a desert island coffee table – then I suggest this simple solution: take, let’s say Logos Rising as your book, and take The Dangers of Beauty as your luxury.

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There's Something About Ukraine

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There's Something About Ukraine

Want to read something about Ukraine? A great lost Catholic thriller from the early 20th century, The Supreme Crime, is set there. Elite newspapers publish annual recommended summer reading lists (“Hottest Summer Reads,” “Ultimate Beach Reads,” etc.), which are usually books on current events, or, alternatively, are scorching page-turners that are easy to read while on vacation? This book is both.

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Healing Iran's Divided Soul

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Healing Iran's Divided Soul

The Ayatollah Sayyid Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi was an important figure in recent Iranian history. Widely recognized as the Ayatollah Khomeini’s heir apparent, Shahroudi was an Iranian-Iraqi dual citizen whose job was to unify Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon under a Shi’a alliance based on anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism whose ultimate goal was the elimination of Israel in collaboration with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Shahroudi was also involved in Iran’s Ostpolitik—or perhaps Nordpolitik would be a better term—which began on January 3, 1989 when the Supreme Leader, as one of his last acts, sent a delegation which included Abdollha Javadi-Amoli, Mohammed Javad Larijani, and Marzieh Hadidchi to Moscow bearing a letter in which Khomeini warned Mikhail Gorbachev of the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. Marxism, in Khomeini’s opinion, could not deal with the world situation because its materialistic ideology could not resolve a spiritual crisis brought on by lack of belief in spirituality, which he considered “the prime affliction of human society in the East and the West alike.”

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Cardinal Pell's White Martyrdom

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Cardinal Pell's White Martyrdom

A treasurable sentence by Evelyn Waugh (Spectator, March 22, 1957) epitomizing Randolph Churchill, Sir Winston’s scapegrace heir, warrants remembrance regarding Australia’s Keith Windschuttle: “No one,” Waugh said, “who knows Mr. Randolph Churchill and wishes to express distaste for him should ever be at a loss for words which would be both opprobrious and apt.” As a historian, Windschuttle possesses merits, of which more below. As publisher, Windschuttle made available at least one impressive contribution to scholarship, James Franklin’s Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia (2003). As editor since 2009 of the Sydney-based monthly Quadrant, Windschuttle has himself been all too prone to misadventures of Randolphian proportions…

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Schönheit Macht Frei: A Report from Hugh Hefner's Love Camp

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Schönheit Macht Frei: A Report from Hugh Hefner's Love Camp

From late January to early February, A & E ran what it called a “documentary event” called “Secrets of Playboy,” which in their words, explored “the hidden truths behind the fable and philosophy of the Playboy empire through a modern-day lens.” Secrets of Playboy, we are told, “delves into the complex world Hugh Hefner created and examines its far-reaching consequences on our culture’s view of power and sexuality.”1 After watching the first four episodes, I learned that Hefner was a ruthless exploiter of young women and that he used one of his favorite bunnies to purchase drugs for him, recklessly endangering her life. Needless to say, I was shocked. Who knew that Hugh Hefner exploited young women? Who knew that Hefner used drugs? Sondra Theodore, who is now in her sixties, made this admission a year ago, four years after Hefner’s death in September 2017. If she had made it in 1973, Hefner would have gone to prison…

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No Jew, No Spirit, No Revolutionary

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No Jew, No Spirit, No Revolutionary

Jones: his videos are missing from YouTube, his books are absent from Amazon, powerful organizations have called for his voice to be legally silenced. The effect has been to attract the attention of many people who would otherwise never have heard of him. The doors of the academy are shut to him: the effect has been to propel him away from the over-specialized minutiae that occupy today’s best minds, into wide-ranging reflections on culture and society as a whole. He now writes books of a scope and ambition he could never have attained in a career guided by the exigencies of academic advancement, and his work probably reaches a wider readership than the most prestigious of professors.

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Beautiful World: Rooney's Metaphysics and Morality

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Beautiful World: Rooney's Metaphysics and Morality

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber, Farrar, Straus & Gioux, 2021)
Reviewed by Sean Naughton

There is an intriguing passage in Beautiful World, Where Are You (no question mark) about the topography of Dublin city. Dublin, I was tickled to learn, is flat, literally speaking, excessively horizontal as main character Alice Kelleher sees it, with neither hills nor hollows – nor even an underground railway system. Having lived there from 1982 – 86, I’m well aware that Dublin has no underground train system, but the flatness of the city itself never dawned on me, which is why people like me should read books like this – just to get a sense of how blind we are…

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Dachau for Dummies: A Review of The Defeated

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Dachau for Dummies: A Review of The Defeated

So much for the plot. When it comes to character, another crucial component of drama, we get to know Officer McLaughlin better through a shameless example of a “Save the Cat” scene. The term comes from Blake Snyder’s book of the same name. Snyder refers to it as a “basic” principle in establishing character in film, and the moral values we’re supposed to attach to that character. The “Save the Cat” moment occurs in “the scene where we meet the hero and the hero does something—like saving a cat—that defines who he is and makes us, the audience, like him.”1 When Al Pacino in Sea of Love lets a parole violator off with the witty line, “Catch you later,” because he showed up at a Yankees game with his son, it is impossible not to like the character Pacino is paying. Or as Snyder puts it, “I don’t know about you, but I like Al. I’ll go anywhere he takes me now and you know what else?

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Kicking the Habit: Nuns and Blasphemy

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Kicking the Habit: Nuns and Blasphemy

Rachel Handler can’t stop grinning. The senior editor at Vulture/ NY Mag used her credentials as an actress best known for playing Chunks in the 2016 horror movie Smothered1 to cop a press pass to the Cannes Film Festival, where she attended a screening of Paul Verhoeven’s nunsploitation flick Benedetta, and she is absolutely giddy from the film’s sexually titillating message, which is that nuns are all sexually frustrated lesbians, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term:

Nunsploitation is a subgenre of exploitation film which had its peak in Europe in the 1970s. These films typically involve Christian nuns living in convents during the Middle Ages. The main conflict of the story is usually of a religious or sexual nature, such as religious oppression or sexual suppression due to living in celibacy. The Inquisition is another common theme. These films, although often seen as pure exploitation films, often contain criticism against religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Indeed, some protagonist dialogue voiced feminist consciousness and rejection of their subordinated social role. Many of these films were made in countries where the Catholic Church is influential, such as Italy and Spain. One atypical example of the genre, Killer Nun (Suor Omicidi), was set in then present-day Italy (1978).

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The Repressed Returns to Germany: A Review of "The Appointment"

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The Repressed Returns to Germany: A Review of "The Appointment"

Zelda Biller begins her review of Katharina Volckmer’s debut novel The Appointment, by claiming that it tells “a story that no German publishing house dared to publish.”1 The assertion is correct, but not in the way she intended it. Blinded by Volckmer’s deliberately obscene and transgressive narrative, Biller concluded that the issue was sex. If so, that issue resolved itself when a German publishing house decided to publish a German translation of the original English edition as if to prove that “all of the sexually inhibited German editors” who turned down Volckmer’s manuscript were somehow unrepresentative of the German publishing industry. So, it wasn’t about sex after all. Volckmer’s book is, however, most definitely about taboos, and she is clever enough to hide those very real taboos behind sexual taboos which disappeared a long time before she was born. No publishing house, either English or German, would have published this book if their editors understood what Volkmer is really saying about the real but hidden taboos which dominate Germany at this moment in time.
The Appointment begins by describing sex in a way that has become typically German in its deliberately transgressive crudity. The nameless narrator/protagonist is being examined gynecologically by a surgeon who is taking the lay of the land in anticipation of doing a sex change operation. Biller summarizes the situation by telling us that:

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The Decline and Fall of the BBC

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The Decline and Fall of the BBC

The Noble Liar is just the perfect length for the impatient reader. At 340 pages, it’s long enough to make the author’s case, but short enough, if you’re impatient enough, to get through in a day – once you commit to it – which is almost inevitable given the cogency of the introduction. The possibility of a one-day reading is helped greatly by the clarity and quality of the writing; you never have to reread a sentence, and you might not even need your glasses, given the very generous spacing of the print…

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Soral's Catholic Problem and Ours

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Soral's Catholic Problem and Ours

The main legacy of Freemasonry in America is the reality of oligarchic control and its total hegemony over the political process, rendering local government an essentially meaningless formality. The Duc d’Orleans, who changed his name to Phillippe Egalite when he abandoned aristocratic privilege and joined up with the French Revolution, expressed this trajectory best when he said, in a memoir written the night before the revolution which he supported marched him to the scaffold, that the lodge was to the revolution what the candle was to the sun. Once the sun of revolution rose, the candle was no longer necessary.

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Pro-Life Requiem

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Pro-Life Requiem

I first met Joe Scheidler at a Judie Brown American Life League, conference in what must have been 1982 or 1983. I don’t remember his speech although I’m sure he gave one. I do remember getting into a cab with him after the conference was over and both of us were on our way to the airport. He was well-known at the time, having made a name for himself as a leader of the prolife movement; I was unknown, and so it was natural that he would ask what I did for a living. “I edit a magazine called Fidelity,” I said, referring to the same magazine which would quote him five years later.

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