The Pilgrim Fathers: America’s True Founding Spirit

While Jamestown and the ill-fated Roanoke colony preceded them, it was the Puritan settlers—beginning with the Pilgrims at Plymouth—who provided the enduring moral, cultural, and institutional foundation for what became the United States. Roanoke simply vanished, leaving behind only cryptic clues and the haunting label “Lost Colony.” Jamestown, for all its ambitions—searching for a northwest passage, spreading Anglican Christianity, hunting gold, and establishing English claims—remained a precarious commercial venture plagued by starvation, disease, and conflict. Its legacy is real, but limited. The Puritan colonies, by contrast, endured and multiplied, shaping the Thirteen Colonies and the character of the young republic.

On November 11, 1620 (Old Style), the Mayflower’s passengers—Separatists who had fully broken from the Church of England—dropped anchor at Provincetown Harbor. By March 16, 1621, after a brutal winter that claimed nearly half their number, a lone Native American named Samoset strode boldly into the settlement. He famously asked for beer. The Pilgrims did not hand over their precious stores, but they offered him alcohol and a meal. That act of hospitality forged friendship. Through Samoset and later Squanto, peaceful relations with local tribes took root, enabling the colony’s survival and the first Thanksgiving. It was a small gesture with outsized consequences: pragmatic welcome grounded in faith.

The Puritan wave extended far beyond Plymouth. The broader Puritans who founded Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, New Haven, and (through dissenters) Rhode Island carried a different but related vision: not total separation at first, but the reform and purification of the English church. They came primarily as families, not lone adventurers or soldiers. They prized education so that every believer could read the Bible. They established schools, colleges (Harvard in 1636), and town covenants that emphasized consent, moral order, and accountability. Within fifty years of Plymouth’s founding, England itself had endured civil war, Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth, and the Restoration of the monarchy. Puritanism faltered at home amid political excess, but it took deep root across the Atlantic.

These colonies differed profoundly from earlier efforts. They were built on covenant theology—the idea that communities, like individuals, stood in solemn agreement with God. This fostered habits of self-government, literacy, and industry that proved far more durable than gold-seeking or military outposts. Their success became a beacon. It inspired other dissenting groups, including Anabaptists whose stricter traditions later produced the Amish communities that still testify to plain living and separation from worldly excess.

Puritanism has taken an unfair beating in modern telling. The English Interregnum’s excesses and, especially, the Salem witch trials of 1692–93 are held up as proof of bigotry and hysteria. Yet the trials occurred amid genuine fear and strange afflictions. Young women exhibited fits, sensations of being pinched and bitten, and other torments. Even a test—giving a dog urine from one of the afflicted, which reportedly caused the animal to convulse, chew rocks, and ultimately be put down—suggested something real was at work. Historians have pointed to ergot poisoning from moldy rye as a possible physiological trigger, alongside social tensions, factionalism, and spectral evidence. The authorities were not cartoon “hanging judges” but sober men facing an outbreak they did not fully understand. In a society that believed in the reality of spiritual warfare, they acted on the evidence available to them. To dismiss it all as mere victim-blaming ignores the complexity and the era’s worldview.

After the Revolution, America’s religious landscape diversified rapidly. French and Spanish settlers brought their own muscular Catholic expressions to the South and West. The Quaker influence grew, producing leaders and a distinctive witness for peace. By the 20th century, a Catholic (John F. Kennedy) could win the presidency, and evangelical voices under leaders like George W. Bush became a potent political force. Waves of immigrants and awakenings added layers—Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, and more. Today, America is not defined by any single denomination. Yet her spiritual and cultural father remains the Pilgrim who welcomed a stranger with spirits and vittles, who endured unimaginable hardship for the sake of conscience, and who planted institutions ordered toward liberty under God.

The Puritan legacy is not perfection but persistence: a commitment to moral seriousness, education, ordered liberty, and the belief that a people can form a “city upon a hill.” In an age quick to condemn the past, we do well to remember that the same soil that produced Salem also produced the Mayflower Compact, town meetings, common schools, and a resilient work ethic that propelled the American experiment. The Pilgrim spirit—practical, hospitable, Bible-shaped—still whispers in our national character. We would do well to listen.

The Enduring Lament of "Waly Waly": From Scottish Court Scandal to Timeless Ballad of Love and Faith

In the rich tapestry of British folk music, few songs carry the layered weight of "Waly Waly" — better known today as "The Water Is Wide." A deceptively simple lament of love's fragility, it emerged from the turbulent politics and personal betrayals of 17th-century Scottish nobility, only to evolve through oral tradition, folk revival, and sacred adaptation into a universal meditation on impermanence. Its melody, haunting and adaptable, has bridged secular heartbreak and divine contemplation, finding poignant expression even in the final recordings of the gifted Eva Cassidy as illness claimed her voice.

The song's political origins are rooted in the unhappy marriage of James Douglas, 2nd Marquess of Douglas, to Lady Barbara Erskine in 1670. This union, forged amid the complex alliances of Restoration-era Scotland, unraveled amid accusations of adultery — allegations many historians attribute to court intrigue and a spurned suitor. Lady Barbara's subsequent separation and abandonment inspired ballads that captured her lament, blending personal sorrow with the era's aristocratic scandals. Verses echo the real "Jamie Douglas" (Child Ballad 204), where a high-born woman's renown gives way to forsaken isolation. "O Waly, Waly" (an old Scots exclamation of woe) first crystallized in collections like Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany (1724–1727), drawing from earlier broadsides and floating verses that mixed political gossip, courtly despair, and folk commonplaces.

This was no mere domestic tragedy; it highlighted the precarious power dynamics of Scottish courts, where marriages sealed political pacts, reputations were weapons, and women of rank could be undone by rumor as readily as by royal decree. In an age of shifting loyalties post-Covenanters and amid the lead-up to Union with England, such ballads subtly critiqued the moral rot behind noble facades. The song's imagery — a wide, uncrossable water symbolizing insurmountable barriers, a once-sturdy oak bent and broken by betrayal — mirrored the fractured alliances and personal ruins of the time.

From these contentious beginnings, "Waly Waly" transitioned into new modes with remarkable fluidity, a hallmark of folk evolution. Collected and refined by Cecil Sharp in Folk Songs from Somerset (1906), it shed some of its rawer political edges to become the streamlined "The Water Is Wide," popularized in the American folk revival by Pete Seeger and others. Its melody proved endlessly versatile: Benjamin Britten arranged it for voice and piano, John Rutter incorporated it into orchestral works, and it crossed into pop, film soundtracks, and even fusions with other traditions. Floating verses allowed singers to adapt it to contemporary woes, transforming a Scottish court lament into a universal anthem of love's joys and inevitable fading "like morning dew."

One of its most profound transitions came in sacred music. The tune served as a vehicle for Isaac Watts' hymn "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" (1707), one of the finest expressions of Christian contemplation on Christ's sacrifice. Here, the ballad's themes of transient earthly love were elevated to eternal spiritual reality: human affection's impermanence contrasts with divine constancy. What began as a lament for betrayed nobility became a vehicle for Protestant devotion, underscoring how folk melodies often carried theology across divides of class and creed.

No modern rendition captures the song's emotional depth quite like those of Eva Cassidy. Her crystalline voice brought aching vulnerability to "The Water Is Wide," emphasizing its quiet longing. Even more moving is her studio take on the variant "Waly Waly," recorded near the end of her life as cancer progressed. It was, by accounts from her collaborators, among the last things she could fully perform before illness silenced her. Stripped of artifice, her interpretation distills the song's essence: love's jewel when new, its cold fading, the desperate plea for a boat to cross impossible divides. In her frail yet transcendent delivery, the political origins and sacred adaptations recede, leaving raw humanity — a dying artist singing of mortality's waters with the grace of one who has surveyed her own cross.

Today, "Waly Waly" endures as a reminder that the personal is often political, that cultural artifacts mutate across contexts, and that simple melodies can carry profound truths. In an era of fleeting digital affections and renewed court-like intrigues in media and power, its wisdom resonates: love, like the song itself, persists not through permanence but through reinterpretation and honest lament. Whether as folk protest, hymn, or farewell, it invites us to row together while we can.

Is Racism Porn? Will the Anti-Racism Movement Cave Like the Anti-Porn One Did?

In the 1980s, a potent alliance of radical feminists and social conservatives launched a serious campaign against pornography. Led by figures like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, they framed much of it as violence against women — graphic subordination that normalized harm. They pushed civil rights ordinances and influenced the Meese Commission under President Reagan. Yet the movement fractured. Sex-positive feminists rebelled against what they saw as censorship and puritanism. Courts struck down key measures on First Amendment grounds. Violent and extreme porn was temporarily sidelined in mainstream discourse, but the deeper politicized strain of feminism splintered. Today, pornography is ubiquitous, with studies (such as one attempted at a Canadian university that couldn't even find a control group of young men who hadn't viewed it) underscoring its normalization.

The anti-racism movement of recent decades invites a parallel. Both issues started outside the core wheelhouse of center-right conservatives, who traditionally emphasized individual responsibility, rule of law, and color-blind opportunity rather than identity-based crusades. Yet both became vehicles for broader cultural and political power plays.

Historical Perspective on Racism

Academic conservative thought has long pointed to the 19th century as a pivotal era when racism, particularly chattel slavery, faced decisive moral and political challenge in the English-speaking world. British evangelicals — William Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect, and allied Quakers and Methodists — drove the abolition of the slave trade (1807) and slavery itself in the Empire (1833). Their campaign rested on Christian universalism: all men created in God's image, endowed with inherent dignity and rights to freedom, not engineered equal outcomes. This was a rights-based, opportunity-focused vision distinct from later 20th-century interpretations emphasizing group equity or systemic determinism.

Slavery and racial prejudice did not vanish overnight, of course. But the moral framework shifted dramatically through persistent, principle-driven activism grounded in transcendent ethics rather than perpetual grievance.

Modern Enlargement and Exploitation

Critics argue that racism as a dominant political narrative enlarged under President Obama. A notable moment came after the 2012 Trayvon Martin case, when Obama remarked that the deceased "could have been my son," injecting personal identity into a contested incident involving a neighborhood watch confrontation. This style of framing amplified racial polarization.

The 2020 death of George Floyd became a headline catalyst for the movement. While Derek Chauvin was convicted, the initial narrative of murder by knee compression alone has been disproved. The Hennepin County medical examiner cited cardiopulmonary arrest complicating restraint, with heart disease, fentanyl, and methamphetamine as significant contributing factors. An independent autopsy differed, but the full context complicated the "police lynching" storyline. Floyd's death was tragic; the broader "defund the police" and systemic racism narrative built around it has frayed as facts emerged.

Recent revelations about the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) — long a flagship of the anti-racism industry — add to the sense of crumbling. In 2026, federal charges alleged the organization funneled millions in donor funds to informants tied to extremist groups it publicly opposed, raising serious questions of fraud and manufacturing the very threats it fundraised against.

Deeper historical questions resurface: Did authorities facilitate or cover elements of past events like the Oklahoma City bombing? Official accounts point to Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, but persistent theories of additional involvement or negligence remain debated and unproven in court. Such inquiries test institutional trust.

The Parallel and the Warning

Racism is wrong. It violates the principle that individuals should be judged by character and conduct, not skin color. Violent pornography harms, especially when accessible to children, and erodes healthy formation of relationships and sexuality. Both deserve principled opposition rooted in truth and human dignity.

Yet the pattern repeats: moral concerns get hijacked for political dominance. The anti-porn effort split feminism and lost momentum as technology and cultural shifts overwhelmed it. The anti-racism juggernaut, fueled by selective narratives, academic capture, and institutional incentives, now faces headwinds — evidentiary cracks, donor skepticism, and a Trump-era political realignment that prioritizes results over rhetoric.

Will it "cave" similarly? Movements that rely on exaggeration, selective enforcement, and identity as currency often do when reality intrudes. The 19th-century abolitionists succeeded by appealing to universal truths and persistent reform, not perpetual victimhood. Today's exploiters of these issues — whether inflating racism for power or earlier anti-porn zealots — risk the same irrelevance when their narratives no longer hold.

The wiser path lies not in denial of real problems, but in rejecting their weaponization. Protect children from porn. Oppose actual racism with color-blind justice. Demand evidence over emotion. Center conservatives, with their emphasis on individual liberty and equal opportunity under law, may yet provide the steadier framework — as their intellectual forebears did against slavery. The question is whether the broader culture will let principle prevail over power.