I been kicked by the wind, robbed by the sleet
Had my head stove in, but I’m still on my feet
And I’m still willin’— From “Willin’”, by Lowell George
Today is the twentieth anniversary of the founding of Gates of Vienna.
The tenth anniversary happened to fall during our fundraising week, and my late wife Dymphna had the job of writing the post. During our discussion about it I said, “I wonder what the twentieth anniversary will be like.” She replied ruefully, “I don’t think I’ll be around for the twentieth.” And she was right. She didn’t even quite make it to the fifteenth.
The blog was my idea, but it was meant for Dymphna. Her daughter Shelagh had died the year before, and she had been struggling to come out of the abyss of grief she had fallen into after Shelagh’s death. She liked to write, and she was very good at it, so I suggested that we start a blog together. We decided to focus on the Great Jihad, since that was what had been preoccupying us since 9/11. It would be an opportunity to learn more on the subject, and communicate it to the rest of the world.
What made her decide to do it was my recommendation that she take “Dymphna” as her nom de plume. She had first learned of St. Dymphna a few years previously, when a card for the saint had fallen out of a book she bought at a second-hand store. She had looked up Dymphna, and found out that she was the (possibly legendary) daughter of a 7th-century Irish chieftain. After her father was widowed his mental health deteriorated, and he began to direct his amorous attentions towards his daughter. Dymphna fled with her servants to the town of Gheel in what is now Belgium, but her father tracked her down. When she refused him, he beheaded her. Dymphna’s relics were found to have miraculous healing powers for the mentally ill. She was canonized, and became the patron saint of lunatics.
My wife had absorbed all the stories about the life of St. Dymphna, so she took her on as a pseudonym when we started Gates of Vienna.
It’s quite disconcerting to look back on the past twenty years. 2004 seems so recent, yet so much has happened, and the world has changed so much in the interim, that it also feels like a long, long time ago.
When we started our blogging, we mostly stuck to news stories and references to other like-minded blogs. Then in 2005 we branched out into our own topics. First there was Jamaat ul-Fuqra, and not long after that the LGF Wars. While that was going on, I started focusing on Europe, and made a number of trips across the Atlantic to work with the European Counterjihad.
The Breivik Affair in 2011 was like a depth charge dropped into our lives — it’s too much to relate in this brief summary, but it was a devastating shock for our movement, which has never fully recovered. Fjordman was the hardest-hit, obviously, but a number of others opted out of Counterjihad work, and some have never returned.
Yet Dymphna and I persevered. I started working with the English Defence League and the other groups that Tommy Robinson became involved with, including British Freedom, in which Paul Weston was also a principal. The “hate speech” case against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, and the lengthy legal proceedings that accompanied it, extended for more than a decade. Elisabeth led (and is still leading) the difficult but necessary fight to reverse the Islamization of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). I travelled behind the Iron Curtain for the first time in my life when I was part of the delegation to OSCE Warsaw in 2013.
And there were a lot of other significant projects — Lars Vilks and the Mohammed Roundabout Dogs, Geert Wilders, the persecution of Diana West, the Cedar-Riverside Explosion, PEGIDA, and numerous others, too many to list here.
After 2015 there was a subtle change of direction at Gates of Vienna. It began with the election of Donald Trump, when there was a massive, blatant, worldwide effort to sabotage and destroy the new president by any means necessary. A number of enterprises — conspiracies, cabals, call them what you will — that had previously operated in the shadows were forced out into the open. Their operations accelerated during the presidential election campaign in 2020, which provided unprecedented clarification on who was on which side. It turned out, of course, that almost everybody in politics or public administration, for whichever party, was on the side of the Empire, the Cathedral, the Powers That Be — which have been entrenched since at least 1913, and almost certainly much farther back than that.
Then the “pandemic” was ushered in, Mr. Trump was railroaded out of the presidency, and four years of political insanity and deconstruction set in. Dymphna is fortunate to have died before all that happened, because she had Complex Chronic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and watching 2021-2024 would have been psychologically devastating for her.
Once again, events have provided substantial additional clarification, shining a klieg light on all the roaches in the dark corners of our political kitchen. It’s been a grim awakening for me, and there’s no going back to sleep.
Back in the period from roughly 2004 to 2011 I focused on the infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into Western governments and institutions. I naïvely believed that there were still substantial parts of the U.S. government that were not totally corrupted, and if they could become aware of the urgency of the situation, the process of Islamization might yet be reversed.
But since 2016, and especially since 2020, it has become clear that the government is completely corrupt from top to bottom. What’s even worse, however, is that Islamization is just one tool in the toolbox that is being used to deconstruct what remains of traditional institutions. In addition to the Muslim Brotherhood, we see mass immigration, institutionalized sexual perversion, endless war, the debasement of the currency, and plain old Communism being deployed as termites to devour the heartwood of Western Civilization.
That’s where we stand right now, on the verge of whatever additional horrors are to be unleashed upon us between now and Inauguration Day.
I doubt I’ll live to see exactly who is behind the curtain pulling all the levers, and what their precise motives are. Unless the complete Epstein and Diddy client lists are somehow made public, that is — then I may learn something.
So what will things be like at the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gates of Vienna, during the second term of President Harris? Or at the thirtieth anniversary, under President AOC?
Perhaps there will be no United States left anymore when the time comes. By then the landscape between Havre de Grace and Warrenton may well be a blackened wasteland of radioactive ash.
In any case, I probably won’t be around to see it.
Of all the twists and turns my life has taken in the last twenty years, my involvement with the Sons of Confederate Veterans was one of the least expected. I had always respected my great-great-grandfather, 2nd Lieutenant Daniel Weisiger, for his service in the 4th Virginia Cavalry, but until the Wokerati started cancelling General Lee and pulling down statues, I wasn’t motivated to do anything to promote my Southern heritage. Now I’m really glad I did — my stint with the SCV has added depth and breadth to my understanding of the War for Southern Independence.
The gentleman in the photo at the top of this post is a Confederate veteran named Silas Buck. The following article from the Fort Worth Morning Register, published on April 26, 1902, explains the context of the photo. It seems that Mr. Buck (I haven’t been able to determine his rank) had his head stove in for the Confederacy:
FOUND HIS OLD COLORS
Color-Bearer Buck Gets the Flag He Carried in 1864
If all the interesting incidents referring to the civil war that developed during the reunion of the old survivors of the Southern Confederacy could be collated they would make a volume surpassing any now in existence. An old vet was proudly displaying a musty battle-flag to an interested crowd of people in the Texas and Pacific passenger station last night when he attracted a Register reporter, to whom he told his brief story.
The man’s name is Silas C. Buck and he lives at Stephenville, Erath County. He is an uncle to Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Buck of this city. Mr. Buck during the war was color-bearer for the Sixteenth Cavalry, made of volunteers from Alabama and Mississippi. The last fight in which he carried the flag was at Pine Barrens, South Alabama, at which time it was shot full of holes. Mr. Buck was also wounded, a bullet passing through the top part of his head. Being wounded, he turned the flag over to Colonel Spence, who was in command, and until last Tuesday had not set eyes of the flag he carried through the war.
When Mr. Buck reached Dallas he found Colonel Spence there, and to his astonishment he had with him the old flag that he carried in 1864. It was turned over to Mr. Buck along with the Confederate gray hat and jacket that he wore through the conflict, both of which are in a very good state of preservation. Mr. Buck is taking these old war trophies home with him, but before Colonel Spence would allow him to do so, he made him agree to return them to him when he [has] shown them to his friends in Erath County.
(Posted by Mississippi Confederates)