The Appalachian region of America is old. Very old. Perhaps one of, if not THE, oldest existing mountain range in the world. Once a huge, tall mountain range exceeding even the current Himalayas in height, these mountains once rose to around 45,000 feet above sea level, although now they max out at around 6000 feet, after millions of years of erosion.

The only older mountain range I'm aware of is the bedrock remnants of some ancient mountains east of here near the Virginia - North Carolina border that now amount to mere folded hills, the remaining core of a great mountain range that has worn down to nearly nothing over time.

There is strangeness in these hills. Old family tales tell some of it, but those can always be set down as "campfire stories"... until one experiences some of the weirdness for themselves, as I have. Over a long lifetime, one may expect to encounter the occasional glitch in the matrix here, always unexpectedly. I've seen and heard things here that I can't explain. Note well that I said I can't explain them, not that there are no explanations. Just because I can't figure something out doesn't mean that it can't be figured out.

Some things I've never even heard of anywhere else. Not old legends, not shared experiences across a wide range of people, just one-off things that leave me scratching my head and wondering what the hell was that? As an example was the "clanking" noise I once heard coming from the ground at my feet. Never heard of that anywhere else but here, and it wasn't something I expected to encounter on that dark night so many years ago. It just suddenly WAS, and I've never heard it again afterwards.

Other things fit into a more universal framework, like "skyquakes", strange noises emanating from the skies with no observable source. Grace is actually the one who first detected and recorded those at this location. She couldn't explain them, either, although she has zero belief in paranormal things. That doesn't negate the fact that she has also experienced things here in the Appalachians that she has no explanation for. The skyquakes are one, and feeling... "something"... or "someone"... get into the bed at night when no one is there is another.

Note that in recent years, I've heard tales of "skinwalkers", "the rake", "chpuacabras", etc. I tend to discount most of those as "copycat" stories set in these mountains that actually belong to other areas. "Skinwalkers", for example, are a Navajo thing that have never occurred here. This isn't Navajo country. Shapeshifting witches of the Indian variety here almost always changed into owls. "The Rake", "Chupacabras", and "Slenderman" all had their start elsewhere with the development of the internet, and have never occurred here despite tales to the contrary. There is already enough native weirdness here without having to import tales from other places or brand new inventions designed for internet dispersal.

So this thread is intended as a collection point for strange but true tales from the Appalachians. I'll try to add some of my personal experiences here over time, but also more general stories are welcome to it. "Feral people", "Moon-eyed People", strange disappearances, cryptids and the like are all fair game.

To kick things off, here is a video that covers most of the mountain range, north to south, with some of the strangeness that radiates from these mountains. It's a pretty fair overview of what goes on here.




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I was sent a link to here and signed up, Ill prolly just lurk for a bit. 

Looking forward to reading some interesting posts.

You wouldn’t know it though from my latest crazy dangerous invention.

With the success of my last rustic farmhouse style furniture build, I’ve begun another although somewhat more ambitious and complicated. This time though, rather than using fence pickets and 2x4s I actually bought some nice wood (which is an oxymoron) from the Homo Depot. The problem is it looks too new and therefore needed to be distressed to look old to get the look I was going for.

There’s about a million videos on YouTube on how to distress wood, each with different techniques. Some just a combination of stains and paints with others involving a more hardcore approach which is a lot more authentic looking and since hardcore and danger are my middle name, this is the route I took. I spent  five hours in 110+ degree heat today distressing my main pieces (legs and cross-members) and ended up with something I am good with

I started out with a 4” holesaw used by hand down the length of each board to rough up and dig into the grain. The two-sided legs are 6 foot tall.  I then beat everything with a hammer, slammed it with a heavy rusty old chain and poked about 10,000 holes with a punch and screwdriver. I still didn’t have quite the rough sawn look I wanted and wondered what else I could use to give it for that came out of an old sawmill look.

Maybe it was the heat or maybe just the lack of good common sense? I am normally very safety conscious when using my power tools but after rigging my device together, with visions of gutting myself and watching my intestines splooge out of my body, I smiled at myself for my inventiveness.

Taking a buffer/sander thing and removing the rubber pad, I affixed a very old and dead but still damn sharp 10” tablesaw blade.  To my credit, I did point the leading edge of the teeth so they rotated in a backward direction.

May I present the tool I’ve called “Death Wish”!





I imagined if this was battery powered, it would be handy in a zombie apocalypse. I imagined myself as Ash in the Evil Dead but then came back to reality.

Again to my credit, I didn’t rev the thing up to full speed and only put it to wood gently after releasing the trigger on the spin down and it was still scary AF but kind of fun anyway and gave me enough of the crosshatch look I wanted. In a few places I cut it a little deeper than in the below pic.



On the left is the after and on the right is the virgin wood. (please, no jokes about virgin wood!) Combined with the other wood I am using in this project which is already rough cut, I think this is going to look great but the whole process was a lot of hot long hard work. (what's wrong with me tonight?)

When I finished, I dismantled my implement of mass destruction, thanked my lucky stars I wasn’t dead or on the way to the hospital and told myself never to do stupid shit like this again! My arms are going to be sore tomorrow.

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This never happens, well, only reported when it involves Democratic candidates cheating each other. 


https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/06...ion-fraud/

https://ctmirror.org/2024/06/11/bridgepo...ee-ballot/

Quote:It took several years to finally arrest the Democrats who engaged in election fraud in 2019.

Wanda Geter-Pataky, one of the bad actors involved in the 2019 fraud continued her illegal ballot dumps in the 2023 primary mayoral race.


The election fraud in Bridgeport was so bad in 2023 that a judge overturned the mayoral primary results
Last November Superior Court Judge William Clark ordered a new election to be held, citing bombshell video evidence of election fraud as the basis for his decision.


The Gateway Pundit reported in September that mayoral candidate John Gomes’ campaign released a damning video showing evidence of election fraud in the Bridgeport Democratic primary. The video has prompted an investigation by the Bridgeport Police Department for “possible misconduct.”


The video on the Gomes campaign’s Facebook page shows a woman dropping stacks of ‘illegal’ ballots into an absentee ballot box outside the Bridgeport government center, where the city’s Registrar of Voters office is located.

CBS is dumbfounded by the stats and public opinion.

62% of registered voters support deporting ALL illegal immigrants

https://dailypresser.com/doug-g/cbs-news...-illegals/

Quote:In a recent episode of CBS’s Face the Nation, host Margaret Brennan was left dumbfounded when discussing the results of a new poll that showed 62% of registered voters support deporting all illegal immigrants.



The poll, conducted by Harvard-Harris and released last week, asked respondents if they believe that all illegal immigrants should be deported or allowed to stay in the U.S. with a pathway to citizenship.


The majority, including 66% of independents and 87% of Republicans, chose deportation.
Brennan expressed her disbelief at these numbers, stating, “I mean this is really striking because we’ve seen so much coverage over the past few years about how hardline immigration policies are not popular with most Americans.”

Contrary to what many mainstream media outlets have been reporting, it seems that a significant portion of Americans do support stricter immigration policies.


And this sentiment is not limited to just one political party. The poll also found that 55% of Democrats support deportation over granting citizenship.


This may come as a surprise to those who have been following the narrative pushed by some politicians and media outlets that portray stricter immigration policies as being inhumane and unpopular.

But for many right-leaning Americans, this poll simply confirms what they have been saying all along – enforcing our immigration laws is necessary to protect our country and its citizens.


One possible explanation for this shift in public opinion could be the recent surge in illegal border crossings and the resulting strain on resources at the southern border.


According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there were over 178,000 apprehensions at the border in April alone, the highest number in over two decades.

This influx of illegal immigrants has also raised concerns about public safety and national security. The poll found that 67% of respondents believe that illegal immigration increases crime rates and poses a threat to national security.


These findings are not surprising to many conservative Americans who have been calling for stronger border security measures for years. And with the current administration’s more lenient approach to immigration, it seems that their fears may be coming true.
But despite this growing support for stricter immigration policies, there are still those who vehemently oppose any form of deportation.


In fact, Brennan herself seemed to struggle with accepting the results of the poll, stating “I’m just dumbfounded by these numbers.”


This sentiment is echoed by many on the left who argue that deporting all illegal immigrants would be cruel and unjust. However, as this poll shows, there is a significant portion of the American population who do not share this view.

And while some may dismiss these results as being influenced by partisan politics or biased questioning, it is worth noting that Harvard-Harris is considered a reputable polling organization and has been used by both Democrats and Republicans in the past.
WATCH:

Yeah, I don't want my kids or grandchildren joining either, not unless there are some big changes and I am a 3rd generation (that I know of since I have no idea of my grandfather's father) veteran.

PJ explains it pretty well, do you want to fight for "these people and their sick values?" 

With the use of credit cards wait staff can not hide their meager wages from the sticky fingers of some of the 87,000 new IRS agents... Trump says he is not gonna tax tips... I have known people who used to make a couple of hundred a day/night in tips.... good news for them if Trump survives and wins the election.

http://tracking.combatveteransforcongres...AhsYyByRw2

Quote:For 75 Years Cultural Marxism Worked to Destroy American Patriotism, The Family Unit, And Christianity; What Patriotic Americans Must Do to Save The Republic

By Capt Joseph R. John, June 10, 2024, Op Ed # 670 
 
This below listed critically important essay about “Cultural Marxism” by William S. Lind was forwarded to us by LTG Thomas McInerny USMA ’59, USAF (Ret) who passed it on.
 
William S. Lind has a B.A. in History from Dartmouth College and an M.A., also in History, from Princeton University.  He serves as Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism of The Free Congress Foundation based in Washington, DC; he is a Vestryman at St. James Anglican Church in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio.
 
Every American Patriot should read the below history about how “Cultural Marxism” has been working to destroy America’s Patriotic Culture and the US Constitutional Republic for over 75 years.
 
Marxist’s Critical Theory became Critical Race Theory to be used to attack and vilify all white people in the United States.  The attacks on the Family Unit and Christianity were part of the plan to destroy the peaceful and wholesome culture of the US Constitutional Republic.
 
The agent selected to be in charge of changing the US Constitutional Republic into a Marxist State was the dishonest Marxist Manchurian Candidate, Barrack Husein Obama, who misled Patriotic Americans to believe he intended to heal racial strife, but instead he has continued to aggravate and pour salt on that wound ever since his election; he continues to create policies that increase the racial strife in the US Armed Forces and on College campuses.  
 
Obama, his fellow Marxist allies, including Michelle Obama, Valeri Jaret, the Radical Islamic Iranian Mullahs, Susan Rice, Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, the Cuban Communist Party, George Soros, the UN WHO Director Tedros Ghebreyesus, Hillary Clinton, the Venezuelan Communist Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Oman, and the elected Socialist Democrats in the US Senate and the US House have been working for over 65 years to destroy the US Constitutional Republic.
 
A Dark Money Network was exposed in the book, “Arabella: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America” by Scott Walter.  It consists of wealthy Progressive Leftists and Radical Marxist Organizations that have been funding the Cultural Marxist Programs in the US for over 50 years.  They have been buying up radio networks, taking control of newspapers, buying TV Networks, taking control of media outlets, and have taken control of the Democrat Party and turned it into the Socialist Democrat Party.  Their goal has been to instill their failed Marxist ideology into the culture of the United States; Marxism has never worked in any country over the past 150 years. 
 
The Mega donors funding the Marxist Dark Money programs, to destroy the US Constitutional Republic, are promoting the invasion of the US by over 16 million Illegal Aliens from 180 countries, supporting the anti-police lawlessness, tearing down the US Justice System, and are violating the US Constitution.  They include the Ford Foundation, Jeff Bezos, the Rockefeller Foundation, George Soros, the Chinese Communist Party, Mark Zukerberg, the Socialist Democrat Party, Mark Cuban, the Tides Foundation, and Bill Gates.  The money is being used to tear down Patriotic America, indoctrinate America’s youth in Marxism, and eliminate the impressive US History of the Republic. 
 
We recommend that every Patriotic American Citizen who receives this E-mail, should share the below listed historic information about the Marxist’s plan to destroy the US Constitutional Republic, with your fellow American Patriots.  We encourage you to help us fight to prevent Obama and his fellow Marxist allies from succeeding in perpetrating their planned massive Voter Fraud to steal the 2024 Presidential Election, so they can change the US Constitutional Republic into a Marxist State.
 
Cadets and Midshipmen at all 5 US Service Academies and all members of the US Armed Forces must be given the opportunity to read the below listed history of Marxism in the US, and understand what Marxists are doing to destroy the US Constitutional Republic.  Patriotic American Citizens must refute the attempt by Obama to brainwash all members of the US Armed Forces and get them to support Marxist created DEI and CRT which is destroying the “Combat Effectiveness” of the US Armed Forces.
 
At the end of the below listed article William Lind recommends the way Patriotic Americans can save the US Constitutional Republic from “Cultural Marxism.” 
 
Copyright by Capt Joseph R. John.  All Rights Reserved.  The material can only be posted on another Website or distributed on the Internet by giving full credit to the author.  It may not be published, broadcast, or rewritten without the permission from the author.  
 
Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62
Capt         USN(Ret)/Former FBI
Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC
2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184
San Diego, CA 92108 
 
https://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org
 

Sometime during the last half-century, someone stole our culture. Just 50 years ago, in the 1950s, America was a great place. It was safe. It was decent. Children got good educations in the public schools. Even blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes, so moms could stay home with the kids. Television shows reflected sound, traditional values.
 
Where did it all go? How did that America become the sleazy, decadent place we live in today – so different that those who grew up prior to the ’60s feel like it’s a foreign country? Did it just “happen”?
 
It didn’t just “happen.” In fact, a deliberate agenda was followed to steal our culture and leave a new and very different one in its place. The story of how and why is one of the most important parts of our nation’s history – and it is a story almost no one knows. The people behind it wanted it that way.
 
What happened, in short, is that America’s traditional culture, which had grown up over generations from our Western, Judeo-Christian roots, was swept aside by an ideology. We know that ideology best as “political correctness” or “multi-culturalism.” It really is cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms in an effort that goes back not to the 1960s, but to World War I.
 
The end goal of Marxism is destruction.
 
Incredible as it may seem, just as the old economic Marxism of the Soviet Union has faded away, a new cultural Marxism has become the ruling ideology of America’s elites. The No. 1 goal of that cultural Marxism, since its creation, has been the destruction of Western culture and the Christian religion.
 
To understand anything, we have to know its history. To understand who stole our culture, we need to take a look at the history of “political correctness.”
 
Early Marxist Theory:
 
Before World War I, Marxist theory said that if Europe ever erupted in war, the working classes in every European country would rise in revolt, overthrow their governments and create a new Communist Europe. But when war broke out in the summer of 1914, that didn’t happen.
Instead, the workers in every European country lined up by the millions to fight their country’s enemies. Finally, in 1917, a Communist revolution did occur, in Russia. But attempts to spread that revolution to other countries failed because the workers did not support it.
 
After World War I ended in 1918, Marxist theorists had to ask themselves the question: What went wrong?
As good Marxists, they could not admit Marxist theory had been incorrect. Instead, two leading Marxist intellectuals, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary (Lukacs was considered the most brilliant Marxist thinker since Marx himself) independently came up with the same answer.
 
They said that Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true, Marxist class interests, that a Communist revolution was impossible in the West, until both could be destroyed. That objective, established as cultural Marxism’s goal right at the beginning, has never changed.
 
A New Strategy: 

Gramsci famously laid out a strategy for destroying Christianity and Western culture, one that has proven all too successful. Instead of calling for a Communist revolution up front, as in Russia, he said Marxists in the West should take political power last, after a “long march through the institutions” – the schools, the media, even the churches, every institution that could influence the culture.
 
That “long march through the institutions” is what America has experienced, especially since the 1960s. Fortunately, Mussolini recognized the danger Gramsci posed and jailed him. His influence remained small until the 1960s, when his works, especially the “Prison Notebooks,” were rediscovered.
 
Georg Lukacs proved more influential. In 1918, he became deputy commissar for culture in the short-lived Bela Kun Bolshevik regime in Hungary. There, asking, “Who will save us from Western civilization?” he instituted what he called “cultural terrorism.” One of its main components was introducing sex education into Hungarian schools. Lukacs realized that if he could destroy the country’s traditional sexual morals, he would have taken a giant step toward destroying its traditional culture and Christian faith.
 
Far from rallying to Lukacs’ “cultural terrorism,” the Hungarian working class was so outraged by it that when Romania invaded Hungary, the workers would not fight for the Bela Kun government, and it fell. Lukacs disappeared, but not for long. In 1923, he turned up at a “Marxist Study Week” in Germany, a program sponsored by a young Marxist named Felix Weil who had inherited millions. Weil and the others who attended that study week were fascinated by Lukacs’ cultural perspective on Marxism.
 
The Frankfurt School: 

Weil responded by using some of his money to set up a new think tank at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany. Originally it was to be called the “Institute for Marxism.” But the cultural Marxists realized they could be far more effective if they concealed their real nature and objectives. They convinced Weil to give the new institute a neutral-sounding name, the “Institute for Social Research.”
 
Soon known simply as the “Frankfurt School,” the Institute for Social Research would become the place where political correctness, as we now know it, was developed. The basic answer to the question “Who stole our culture?” is the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School.
At first, the Institute worked mainly on conventional Marxist issues such as the labor movement. But in 1930, that changed dramatically. That year, the Institute was taken over by a new director, a brilliant young Marxist intellectual named Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer had been strongly influenced by Georg Lukacs. He immediately set to work to turn the Frankfurt School into the place where Lukacs’ pioneering work on cultural Marxism could be developed further into a full-blown ideology.
 
To that end, he brought some new members into the Frankfurt School. Perhaps the most important was Theodor Adorno, who would become Horkheimer’s most creative collaborator. Other new members included two psychologists, Eric Fromm and Wilhelm Reich, who were noted promoters of feminism and matriarchy, and a young graduate student named Herbert Marcuse.
 
Advances in Cultural Marxism:

With the help of this new blood, Horkheimer made three major advances in the development of cultural Marxism. First, he broke with Marx’s view that culture was merely part of society’s “superstructure,” which was determined by economic factors. He said that on the contrary, culture was an independent and very important factor in shaping a society.
 
Second, again contrary to Marx, he announced that in the future, the working class would not be the agent of revolution. He left open the question of who would play that role – a question Marcuse answered in the 1950s.
 
Third, Horkheimer and the other Frankfurt School members decided that the key to destroying Western culture was to cross Marx with Freud. They argued that just as workers were oppressed under capitalism, so under Western culture, everyone lived in a constant state of psychological repression. “Liberating” everyone from that repression became one of cultural Marxism’s main goals. Even more important, they realized that psychology offered them a far more powerful tool than philosophy for destroying Western culture: psychological conditioning.
 
Today, when Hollywood’s cultural Marxists want to “normalize” something like homosexuality (thus “liberating” us from “repression”), they put on television show after television show where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual.
That is how psychological conditioning works; people absorb the lessons the cultural Marxists want them to learn without even knowing they are being taught.
 
The Frankfurt School was well on the way to creating political correctness. Then suddenly, fate intervened. In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, where the Frankfurt School was located. Since the Frankfurt School was Marxist, and the Nazis hated Marxism, and since almost all its members were Jewish, it decided to leave Germany.
 
In 1934, the Frankfurt School, including its leading members from Germany, was re-established in New York City with help from Columbia University. Soon, its focus shifted from destroying traditional Western culture in Germany to doing so in the United States. It would prove all too successful.
 
New Developments: 

Taking advantage of American hospitality, the Frankfurt School soon resumed its intellectual work to create cultural Marxism. To its earlier achievements in Germany, it added these new developments.
 
Critical Theory:

To serve its purpose of “negating” Western culture, the Frankfurt School developed a powerful tool it called “Critical Theory.”
What was the theory? The theory was to criticize. By subjecting every traditional institution, starting with family, to endless, unremitting criticism (the Frankfurt School was careful never to define what it was for, only what it was against), it hoped to bring them down.
Critical Theory is the basis for the “studies” departments that now inhabit American colleges and universities. Not surprisingly, those departments are the home turf of academic political correctness.
 
Studies in Prejudice:

The Frankfurt School sought to define traditional attitudes on every issue as “prejudice” in a series of academic studies that culminated in Adorno’s immensely influential book, “The Authoritarian Personality,” published in 1950. They invented a bogus “F-scale” that purported to tie traditional beliefs on sexual morals, relations between men and women and questions touching on the family to support for fascism. Today, the favorite term the politically correct use for anyone who disagrees with them is “fascist.”
 
Domination:

The Frankfurt School again departed from orthodox Marxism, which argued that all of history was determined by who owned the means of production. Instead, they said history was determined by which groups, defined as men, women, races, religions, etc., had power or “dominance” over other groups.
 
Certain groups, especially white males, were labeled “oppressors,” while other groups were defined as “victims.” Victims were automatically good, oppressors bad, just by what group they came from, regardless of individual behavior.
 
Though Marxists, the members of the Frankfurt School also drew from Nietzsche (someone else they admired for his defiance of traditional morals was the Marquis de Sade). They incorporated into their cultural Marxism what Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of all values.”
What that means, in plain English, is that all the old sins become virtues, and all the old virtues become sins. Homosexuality is a fine and good thing, but anyone who thinks men and women should have different social roles is an evil “fascist.”
 
That is what political correctness now teaches children in public schools all across America. The Frankfurt School wrote about American public education. It said it did not matter if school children learned any skills or any facts. All that mattered was that they graduate from the schools with the right “attitudes” on certain questions.
 
Media and Entertainment:

Led by Adorno, the Frankfurt School initially opposed the culture industry, which they thought “commodified” culture. Then, they started to listen to Walter Benjamin, a close friend of Horkheimer and Adorno, who argued that cultural Marxism could make powerful use of tools like radio, film and later television to psychologically condition the public.
 
Benjamin’s view prevailed, and Horkheimer and Adorno spent the World War II years in Hollywood. It is no accident that the entertainment industry is now cultural Marxism’s most powerful weapon.
 
The Growth of Marxism in the United States:

After World War II and the defeat of the Nazis, Horkheimer, Adorno and most of the other members of the Frankfurt School returned to Germany, where the Institute re-established itself in Frankfurt with the help of the American occupation authorities. Cultural Marxism in time became the unofficial but all-pervasive ideology of the Federal Republic of Germany.
 
But hell had not forgotten the United States. Herbert Marcuse remained here, and he set about translating the very difficult academic writings of other members of the Frankfurt School into simpler terms Americans could easily grasp. His book “Eros and Civilization” used the Frankfurt School’s crossing of Marx with Freud to argue that if we would only “liberate non-procreative eros” through “polymorphous perversity,” we could create a new paradise where there would be only play and no work. “Eros and Civilization” became one of the main texts of the New Left in the 1960s.
 
Marcuse also widened the Frankfurt School’s intellectual work. In the early 1930s, Horkheimer had left open the question of who would replace the working class as the agent of Marxist revolution. In the 1950s, Marcuse answered the question, saying it would be a coalition of students, blacks, feminist women and homosexuals – the core of the student rebellion of the 1960s, and the sacred “victims groups” of political correctness today.
 
Marcuse further took one of political correctness’s favorite words, “tolerance,” and gave it a new meaning. He defined “liberating tolerance” as tolerance for all ideas and movements coming from the left, and intolerance for all ideas and movements coming from the right.
When you hear the cultural Marxists today call for “tolerance,” they mean Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance” (just as when they call for “diversity,” they mean uniformity of belief in their ideology).
 
The student rebellion of the 1960s, driven largely by opposition to the draft for the Vietnam War, gave Marcuse a historic opportunity. As perhaps its most famous “guru,” he injected the Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism into the baby boom generation.
Of course, they did not understand what it really was. As was true from the Institute’s beginning, Marcuse and the few other people “in the know”did not advertise that political correctness and multi-culturalism were a form of Marxism.
 
But the effect was devastating: a whole generation of Americans, especially the university-educated elite, absorbed cultural Marxism as their own, accepting a poisonous ideology that sought to destroy America’s traditional culture and Christian faith.
That generation, which runs every elite institution in America, now wages a ceaseless war on all traditional beliefs and institutions. They have largely won that war. Most of America’s traditional culture lies in ruins.
 
A Counter-Strategy:

Now you know who stole our culture. The question is, what are we, as Christians and as cultural conservatives, going to do about it?
We can choose between two strategies. The first is to try to retake the existing institutions – the public schools, the universities, the media, the entertainment industry and most of the mainline churches – from the cultural Marxists. They expect us to try to do that, they are ready for it, and we would find ourselves, with but small voice and few resources compared to theirs, making a frontal assault against prepared defensive positions
 
Any soldier can tell you what that almost always leads to: defeat.
There is another, more promising strategy. We can separate ourselves and our families from the institutions the cultural Marxists control and build new institutions for ourselves, institutions that reflect and will help us recover our traditional Western culture.
Several years ago, my colleague Paul Weyrich wrote an open letter to the conservative movement suggesting this strategy. While most other conservative (really Republican) leaders demurred, his letter resonated powerfully with grass-roots conservatives. Many of them are already part of a movement to secede from the corrupt, dominant culture and create parallel institutions: the homeschooling movement.
 
Similar movements are beginning to offer sound alternatives in other aspects of life, including movements to promote small, often organic family farms and to develop community markets for those farms’ products. If Brave New World’s motto is “Think globally, act locally,” ours should be “Think locally, act locally.”
 
Thus, our strategy for undoing what cultural Marxism has done to America has a certain parallel to its own strategy, as Gramsci laid it out so long ago. Gramsci called for Marxists to undertake a “long march through the institutions.”

Our counter-strategy would be a long march to create our own institutions. It will not happen quickly, or easily. It will be the work of generations – as was theirs. They were patient, because they knew the “inevitable forces of history” were on their side. Can we not be equally patient, and persevering, knowing that the Maker of history is on ours?
 
William S. Lind has a B.A. in History from Dartmouth College and an M.A., also in History, from Princeton University. He serves as director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation in Washington, D.C., and as a vestryman at St. James Anglican Church in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio.

Minions of the deep state: Worth a review and some new thoughts.

Watch.

Everyone has a story. Everyone has a perspective. Everyone has an opinion.

Today, more than any other time, we really need to learn to separate the wheat from the chaff. We need to see things as they are, not as anyone else tries to make you see it.