According to the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Born 1950
Group Institute for Historical Review
Location Wendell, NC
Ideology Neo-Confederate
About Boyd Cathey
Boyd Cathey has been involved in several extremist movements, including “radical traditionalist Catholicism,” Holocaust denial and the neo-Confederate movement. In the late 1970s, an extremist Catholic sect ordained Cathey, but he didn’t maintain the faith and became a North Carolina state archivist shortly thereafter. In the first years of the 21st century, Cathey aided an extremist takeover attempt aimed at the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a Southern heritage group.
In His Own Words
“I fully recognize that anything I might say on this subject, at least dealing with Wagner, Judaism and Germany, whether reasonable or not, would probably get me exiled even deeper into the realms of the prejudiced unwashed. … [L]et me only recommend … a scholarly trilogy written by Professor Kevin Macdonald … A PEOPLE WHO SHALL DWELL APART, SEPARATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS, and THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE, which deals with historic Judaism.”
— An April 1999 posting to a CUNY listserv defending German composer Richard Wagner from charges of anti-Semitism and recommending the anti-Semitic works of Kevin MacDonald
“For over one hundred years the SCV [Sons of Confederate Veterans] has honored both the memory AND the ideals of the Confederate soldier, but historical memory alone is NOT the SCV’s only role or that of other heritage organizations. The heritage movement is not just a ‘civil war roundtable’ or a ‘history club.’ It is rather a movement… . Like their forbears of 1860-1861, those engaged in the heritage struggle today see themselves in a direct line from Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and so many others, defending the same principles and the same inherited cultural legacy. They want only to live those same principles… .”
— 2004 article in the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens’ Citizens Informer newsletter, defending racist SCV leaders
Background
For three decades, radical right-wing activist and author Boyd Cathey has worked to bridge mainstream conservative politics and the far-right fringe worlds of Holocaust denial, extremist Catholicism, and racially tinged neo-Confederate causes.
As a young man, Cathey studied in Argentina, Spain and Switzerland at institutions run by the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), a “radical traditionalist Catholic” sect that was censured by the Vatican for refusing to comply with modern theological reforms (including reconciliation with Jews and other faiths), and Opus Dei, a far-right Catholic organization that long supported Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.
According to an SSPX newsletter, Cathey was ordained in 1979 and went on to teach at the society’s seminary in Ridgefield, Conn. Two years later, he landed a job at the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, where he has worked ever since as an archivist in the Resource Management branch.
After taking his job as a state archivist, Cathey began cultivating ties to far-right journals and groups, starting with Southern Partisan magazine. Based in Columbia, S.C., Southern Partisan is effectively the journal of the hard-core neo-Confederate movement, a magazine once described by The New Republic as a “gumbo of racist apologias.” It regularly publishes rants against homosexuality, feminism, affirmative action and multiculturalism, all while painting a rosy picture of the quality of life for African-American slaves in the pre-Civil War South.
Cathey’s first article appeared in Southern Partisan in 1984 and was a lengthy profile of a Confederate war veteran who rebelled against industrialization in the post-bellum South. The same issue carried a column by another writer that read, “Negroes, Asians, and Orientals (is Japan the exception?); Hispanics, Latins, and Eastern Europeans; have no temperament for democracy, never had, and probably never will. … It may be impolite and unpolitic to bring the subject up, but can our democratic system endure unless we close the frontiers to people who are not culturally and racially predisposed to honor its assumptions?”
The mastheads of subsequent issues of Southern Partisan — from 1984 to 1999 — variously identified Cathey as a contributor, editor, or senior adviser.
In 1988, Cathey was named North Carolina co-chair for the presidential campaign of anti-gay televangelist and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson, who is known for espousing conspiracy theories involving Jewish bankers and Freemasons. Four years later, he became state campaign manager for white nationalist commentator Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign.
During the 1992 Buchanan campaign, Cathey was exposed for having joined the editorial advisory committee of the Journal of Historical Review in 1989. That journal is published by the notorious Newport, Calif.-based Institute for Historical Review (IHR), arguably the world’s leading Holocaust denial organization. IHR was founded by well-known anti-Semitic publisher Willis Carto. (At a July 2002 IHR conference, one of Cathey’s fellow advisory committee members, French “researcher” Robert Faurisson, opened his lecture by decrying “the lie of the alleged Holocaust and the alleged gas chambers.”)
As early as 1996, Cathey claimed that he had quit his IHR position. But seven years later, in 2003, the group’s leader was still saying that Cathey was on IHR’s advisory committee, and Cathey’s name remained on IHR’s website.
More recently, Cathey became a key player in the multi-year attempt by racist extremists to assume control of the Sons of Confederate Veterans heritage group. The takeover began when controversial neo-Confederate leader Ron Wilson was elected commander in chief of the SCV in August 2002. Following his election, Wilson purged some 300 members who criticized racism within the group, including the SCV’s North Carolina public information officer. Wilson replaced that officer with Cathey, whom Wilson had earlier appointed to the SCV’s executive council.
In June 2003, Cathey, propagandizing for extremist SCV members in the continuing internal battle for control of the organization, called for increased activism from its members. He also complained bitterly of the “immense numbers of ‘Yankees’ and ‘Latinos'” who have moved to the South and “change[d] our society.”
Though he appears to have been less active than in previous years, Cathey was listed online in 2011 as a member of the “academic board” of the neo-Confederate League of the South’s North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission. The Commission purported to remind North Carolinians that their state had been “forced out of the Union” to fight not for slavery but for “the American principle of self-government.”
Boyd Cathey writes for Unz.com:
Why I Support Donald Trump and Not Ted Cruz
It was my mentor and friend, the late Dr. Russell Kirk, whose volume The Conservative Mind actually initiated what became the older, scholarly “conservatism” in the 1950s. “Conservatism,” as Kirk explained it, encompassed an inherent distrust of liberal democracy, staunch opposition to egalitarianism, and an extreme reluctance to commit the United States to global “crusades” to impose American “values” on “unenlightened” countries around the world. Conservatives should celebrate local traditions, customs, and the inherited legacies of other peoples, and not attempt to destroy them. America, Kirk insisted, was not founded on a democratic, hegemonic ideology, but as an expression and continuation of European traditions and strong localist, familial and religious belief. Indeed, Kirk authored a profound biography of Senator Robert Taft, “Mr. Conservative,” who embodied those principles.
Beginning in the 1970s into the 1980s there was an influx of former Leftist and ex-Trotskyite intellectuals and writers, who had become anti-Communists and who began to move to the right into the older conservative movement. These were denominated the Neoconservatives, or Neocons. At first the Neocons were welcomed as ex-Marxists “coming in from the cold.” The problem was, and still is, that the Neocons brought with them not only their welcomed and spirited anti-Communism, but also their intellectual template of across-the-board egalitarianism, internationalism, and an a priori liberal and global interventionist foreign policy, which has, as its underlying principle, an almost chiliastic belief in imposed “liberal democracy” as the “final stage” of human (and secular) progress. And it is that Idea of (irreversible) Progress, which means the destruction of older traditions, customs, and those things considered “reactionary” that stand in the way of Progress, that characterizes most of Neocon thinking. Such ideas, needless to say, run counter to traditional conservative principles.
With strong academic connections and financial sources, the Neocons soon took control of most of the older conservative foundations, think tanks, and publications, and they did so with an iron hand, reminiscent of older days, when their Marxism was readily visible. And, more significantly, through this control of most “conservative” institutions, especially those centered in Washington, D. C., they very soon began to provide experts and advisors to the national Republican Party and its candidates. Their dominance manifested itself in organs such as the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and in publications like Commentary, The Public Interest, and National Review (which shed its previous attachments to the older conservatism). The advent of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, with Fox News television, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and the New York Post as its notable voices, cemented this influence, which manifested itself abundantly in post-Reagan GOP policies and prescriptions.
With the triumph of the Neocons, conservatism soon no longer resembled what it once was. The principles which so characterized the Old Right were replaced with an ideological zeal for the very opposite of those principles. Older conservative icons such as John Randolph and John C. Calhoun, included prominently in Kirk’s pantheon of great conservatives, were, due to their opposition to egalitarianism, expelled from the Neoconservative lexicon, to be replaced by Abraham Lincoln, and later figures such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King. (And Southerners like Sam Ervin, Harry Byrd Sr., Robert E. Lee, Wade Hampton, etc., were now uniformly condemned and rejected by the new “mainstream conservatives.”)
Lincoln, who was not included in Kirk’s pantheon, became the new and real “Founder” of the American republic, as the editor of the post-William Buckley National Review, Rich Lowry, contends. The civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, with its far-reaching and radical court decisions, was pronounced to be “conservative,” and, at the same time, Southern conservatives, such as the brilliant Mel Bradford, and anti-egalitarians, such as Dr. Samuel Francis, were purged out of the “movement.” Scholars such as Bradford, Joseph Sobran, and the internationally-recognized political scientist/historian, Paul Gottfried, had their careers attacked, were denied well-deserved professional positions, and were banished from formerly conservative publications and access to the largesse of formerly conservative foundations.
Libertarians, too, were shown the door. Never a good fit within the older conservative movement of the 1960s, their exit began long before the triumph of Neoconservatism, with prominent advocates associating at such foundations as the Ludwig von Mises Institute or congregating in certain college economics departments, writing via sites such as LewRockwell.com, and publishing scholarly works by the Liberty Fund. Politically, their most significant leader in recent years has been Ron Paul, but his prescriptions and views were dismissed just as firmly as were those of the Old Right, or paleoconservatives, as they were sometimes called.
No one was allowed to violate the new orthodoxy without severe consequences. But more revolutionary, the logic of Neoconservative egalitarianism, when carried out to its fullest extent, has meant that very many of those now-termed Mainstream Conservatives presently endorse, either openly (e.g., Jonah Goldberg, the National Review magazine, etc.), or tacitly (e.g. George Will, Charles Krauthammer at Fox, and a majority of national mainstream conservative “opinion leaders”), such aberrations as same sex marriage and feminism, and various absurdities under the rubric of civil rights. And at the same time they push zealously for “regime change” internationally everywhere (which also means eventual control by Wall Street). This has meant American misadventures in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and elsewhere.
Thus, in a very real sense, what is commonly termed “conservatism” today has not been truly conservative in the traditional sense for probably three or four decades, at least. Indeed, political scientists and historians such as Gottfried, Claes Ryn (at Catholic Univ), Gary Dorrien (in his study, The Neoconservative Mind), and others have examined this transition in some detail.
Turning to current Republican politics, for the first time since 1992 and the Pat Buchanan campaign, there is actual opposition, if a bit amorphous, this year to the reigning Neoconservative template that has dominated Republican policy thinking. The campaign rhetoric and views of Donald Trump, I would suggest, represent a potential break with the regnant Neoconservative orthodoxy. Perhaps more importantly, none of the GOP candidates, save Trump, is really capable of challenging the Neoconservative template, and this is precisely why most of the GOP and Neocon elites despise him so much. Thus, while the Neocon and GOP Establishment heartily dislike Ted Cruz, they actually fear and loathe Trump. Trump, is not a “movement conservative,” that is, he is not a Republican candidate schooled in the narrative of Neoconservatism (while Marco Rubio wallows in it). In the current political context, the term “conservative” is used so cavalierly that every GOP candidate now claims the mantel: Jeb, Kasich, Christie, Rubio, and so on: all claim to be “movement (or mainstream) conservatives.”
Trump is the candidate who has been bold and farsighted enough to raise the real issues that are affecting every day Americans, not just “movement conservatives.” Most importantly, there is the supremely significant issue of illegal immigration. Consider, for example, what has happened to California, that up to the 1980s was considered a reliably “conservative” state, but after the 1986 Immigration Act, and three-to-four million new immigrants from Latin America, most illegal, will no longer ever vote for a Republican, much less any kind of conservative. The question is: do we want this to continue to happen? Who will be the candidate who will actually stop—and reverse—this?
Then, there is the issue of Muslims coming to America. Trump’s plan to temporarily bar them coming in until a proper and secure screening system is put into place, is not only logical, it is completely constitutional and legal. Various legal experts and historical and judicial precedents confirm Trump’s proposal; indeed, Professor Jan Ting has mined the archives to discover ample support for Trump’s pledge, including rulings by the Supreme Court, the Immigration and Citizenship Act of 1952 (U.S.C. Title 8, Section 1182), and actions by Presidents Jimmy Carter, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and others; also, No other candidate, including Ted Cruz, has advocated the same program, and several have mindlessly attacked him for it. But does anyone doubt that Trump would do it?
It is Trump who, on the issue of militant Islam, inspires both the hatred and fear of politically-correct multiculturalists, not just in this country, but around the world. In Britain a petition has been pushed by the political Left to ban Trump’s entry into the United Kingdom. Signed by more than a half-million people and endorsed by the usual assortment of far left and communist organizations, it has actually been debated in the English parliament (January 18, 2016). And although the Conservative Party Prime Minister David Cameron has condemned Trump’s proposal as “divisive, stupid and wrong,” he has stopped short of endorsing a ban of Trump’s entry; Ted Cruz has not been the object of similar attacks. The internationalist politically-correct elites recognize their primary foe.
And the Leftist Hollywood elites are lining up against Trump. Notorious Vietcong supporter Jane Fonda has organized a committee to “Stop hate dump Trump.” Including such old school pro-communists as Harry Belafonte and leftists like Jonathan Demme, the committee has boasted that it has 1,200 supporters, and has condemned Trump, declaring: “We are offering Americans a chance to be heard and engage in action, as Trump’s campaign gains momentum even as he increases his hateful and divisive rhetoric.”
At almost every Trump rally there are demonstrators, from Black Lives Matter, from various pro-illegal immigration groups, and those representing an assortment of Marxist organizations. After recent protests in North and South Carolina, immigration lawyer, Marty Rosenbluth, speaking for a network of such groups, declared: “Let’s just say if Mr. Trump comes back to our neighborhood, we might pay him a visit… He is the real enemy of progressives this year.” [http://www.aol.com/article/2016/01/11/muslim-womans-silent-trump-protest-was-far-from-spontaneous/21295624/?icid=maing-grid7%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl21%7Csec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D-1343401184] It is clear that the Left and the Establishment know who is their real enemy in 2016…
Neoconservative publicists and thought-shapers, like Bill Kristol and George Will, literally hate Donald Trump. Will, especially, has written with a venom and unrestrained passion that even for him is unaccustomed. His latest anti-Trump philippic appeared in the National Review on December 23, 2015. [http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428906/donald-trump-threat-republican-party]. Weekly Standard editor Kristol has suggested that if Trump were the GOP standard bearer in 2016, the Establishment might launch a third party effort. As the editor of the Neocon organ tweeted out on December 21, 2016, “Crowd-sourcing: Name of the new party we’ll have to start if Trump wins the GOP nomination? Suggestions welcome at [email protected].”
Trump has continued to lead the Republican pack, even pad his lead in the polls. Thus, one of the latest desperation tactics in this power politics game on the part of a few members of the GOP Establishment was evident on Fox News’s “Special Report with Bret Baier,” Thursday night, January 21, as panelists, including Charles Krauthammer and Nina Easton of Fortune magazine whose utter contempt for Trump was so readily visible recently, now appear to want to cozy up to the New York billionaire, and criticize Cruz. The immediate hope was clearly to rattle some hard core, anti-Establishment Trump supporters, cast some doubts, and peel them away over to Cruz, and thus strengthen the second-place Cruz to the point that he could neutralize Trump’s strong lead. The strategy here was simple: destroy your real enemy by appearing to embrace that enemy. That way, a Marco Rubio, or perhaps a Chris Christie, or even Jeb or Kasich, might slip through and become a real player. After all, these latter four are their real candidates.
But just as this strategy seemed to blossom, Rich Lowry’s National Review assembled a group of twenty-two Neocons/GOP Establishment writers to launch a massive, multi-focused, and vicious attack on Trump and his lack of what they termed “conservative” credentials, at least as they see it. Among the writers we find the usual zealous globalist and egalitarian advocates, including Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz (these two, sons of two of the ex-Marxist founders of neoconservatism), Andrew McCarthy, Cal Thomas (the Neocon Evangelical), and the George Soros-supported Southern Baptist Russell Moore. Each author penned a short assault on Trump and his lack of “conservative” orthodoxy, reading him out of “movement conservatism.” Moore summed up much of their charges, condemning “Trump’s vitriolic–and often racist and sexist–language about immigrants, women, the disabled, and others…” (January 21, 2016). That such leftist-sounding language should appear in what was once considered the premiere conservative magazine in the United States, should come as no surprise. After all, under Lowry and his team at National Review has endorsed same sex marriage as “conservative” and no longer resembles the journal began by William F. Buckley. Clearly, the strategy to stop Trump involves both attacks by some neocon thought-leaders on his conservative bona fides, while others seem to accept his inevitability. And, equally evident is that the real intended recipient of these double-edged initiatives would be a Marco Rubio, or perhaps a Christie or even Jeb Bush.
In some ways, their attempt to expel and silence Trump is reminiscent of earlier efforts to rid their movement of any elements that they deemed undesirable or that dared suggest that Neocon dogma is the only acceptable version. It is exactly what they did to members of the older conservatism. They continue to fail miserably to understand Donald Trump’s strong appeal, not just to those who think of themselves as grass roots conservatives, but to a broader, more populist and nationalist cross-section of Americans.
COMMENTS:
* I had to laugh at how Mr. Cathey carefully avoids mentioning the ethnic origin of the Neoconservatives.
I have to wonder whether he thinks that we really are under attack from “radical Islam”. Or is he just pretending to believe that?
The problem is: how can you be opposed to the neocons if you accept the central myth that those self-same neocons have constructed?
How do you oppose the neocons if you’re terrified of pointing out that they are Jews whose primary loyalty is to international Jewry and the state of Israel?
* Presumably you would accept that people tend to seek to avoid cognitive dissonance and that the American Jews you anathematise presumably regard themselves as loyal patriotic Americans. Is it not plausible to see most of the Jewish neo-cons as people who maintain mental comfort with some such general prima facie belief as “what’s good for Israel is generally good for the USA”? It may have been urban myth that he said it but no one seems to have rejected as absurd the “what’s good for General Motors is good for the USA” of “Engine Charlie” Wilson when Secretary of Defense.
People like to feel that their ideas fit together consistently, do they not?
* The history of the postwar conservative movement is indeed a legacy of failure. But the failure begins not with the neoconservatives claiming to be “mugged by reality”, it begins with the very real personal failings of William F. Buckley Jr.
The man regarded as the movement’s founder, was the descendant of oil money who lived as an Long Island version of the Beverly Hillbillies. In addition to his time in the CIA, and their likely funding of NR as they did Partisan Review, he was always motivated to keep the ‘movement’ on an internationalist track. Others were tolerated until their foundations could be rotted, and then subsequently demolished.
If indeed as it appears, Trump wins the nomination, the GOP elected officeholders will almost certainly grovel toward his position. The neoconservatives will face a starker quandry, they depend almost entirely on the generosity of two men: Murdoch and Anschutz. This funding is dependent on their ability to be ideological gatekeepers. If they can’t do that, they will retreat back to the center-left that their fathers left with the death of Henry Jackson. They have regressed to the mean.
