Thomas Fleming is no longer with Rockford Institute. Founder of the League of the South now runs Fleming Foundation. Institution dedicated to wailing "All is Lost."

Thomas Fleming is no longer with the Rockford Institute. He is now running the Fleming Foundation which seems to consist of himself as he pointed out.

Link to the Fleming Foundation:  https://fleming.foundation/

This is his Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/thomas.fleming.5249?fref=ts

It seems he left in March 2015 which he announced on his Facebook page.

He was the editor at Chronicles magazine of the Rockford Institute since 1984.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blogs/thomas-fleming/

The person who founded the Rockford Institute and probably provided a good deal of the money, John Addison Howard, has passed way in August 2015.
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2015/October/39/10/magazine/article/10829597/

I don't know if Howard's passing is related to Fleming's exit from the Rockford Institute. It could be that Howard was incapacitated and didn't have influence on the running of the Rockford Institute at the time of Fleming's exit, or it could be that Howard faced with the end of his life decided that he needed to finally act to preserve the Rockford Institute. I doubt I will ever find out.

Howard is most remembered in Rockford, Illinois for his attempt, as president of Rockford College, to make the college  a right wing college with purges of those who he didn't like.

The first change of Fleming's status at the Rockford Institute was that he was no longer its president but he was to remain Editor of Chronicles magazine as announced in the March 2015 issue of Chronicles.  There was some comment about his replacement able to get donors interested in the institute. In the March, April, May and June issues, articles by Fleming were run in his usual place in the magazine. Then he is not there.

As his America changed towards greater democracy and inclusion of minorities of all types and with immigration Fleming saw that his hope for a reactionary restoration was not going to happen. However, I don't think you can get support for a magazine or an institution if your message is that things are hopeless and that your goal is to save some cultural items for the future as if a new dark ages is coming.

Fleming mentally existed in the ancient classical world of the Greeks and Romans, including the Byzantines and has never really left it, if anything he has more and more existed mentally within that world.

Having read 30 years of Fleming's essays, I can tell you they often had a theme, but he would start out in the classical world (Ancient Rome and Greece) and work his way through the medieval world and thorough modern times and then get to his subject which the history he related was supposed to illustrate.

The Fleming Foundation has chosen Boethius to identify with. Boethius lived at the end of the  Western Roman Empire and represents the idea of the Fleming Foundation that they are repeating the work of Boethius for a coming dark ages.

Thomas Fleming is now no longer with the Rockford Institute where he had at least the comradeship of his fellow reactionaries, though he probably has supporters in Rockford, Illinois who will go to his activities of the Fleming Foundation.

I don't have any sympathy with Fleming's plight. He hoped to break up the United States of America, he hoped to reverse all the accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement. He was hostile to every movement giving social justice to any minority and women. In the June 1987 Chronicles magazine, page 37, Jane Greer is gleeful that the jury supported a gay basher.

Fleming was quite adamant about reactionaries consider the need for violence at some point.

Instead of achieving these goals he lives in a world with gay marriage and an African American president.

To Fleming it is a dark ages since he doesn't see a future where a reactionary regime with the subordination and persecution of many groups can be accomplished. Where even Tea Party elements think he is fringe. His agenda has no hope.  When he founded the Southern Partisan in 1979, and even when he started being the editor of Chronicles in 1984 there was still the possibility that the election of Reagan might be the start of a long trek to the right in politics with the reversing the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, with the defeat of the gay rights movement and feminism.

The counter-revolution never came. Fleming can see with immigration and the changing attitudes of Americans that his counter-revolution will not happen in his life time and not in any future  visible to the present.

Fleming probably feels his world is coming to end also because he can see the declining interest in classical studies. (studies of the Romans and Greeks). When I was young knowing about the Romans and Greeks was essential to be considered educated and I read a great deal. I even purchased Theodore Mommsen's "Provinces of the Roman Empire," two volumes. Maybe someday I will read it.

In the early and mid-twentieth century the fall of Rome was a topic of popular interest, reasons given usually were related to someones political agenda.

However, in the 1960s Latin was being dropped from the high schools. Interest has declined steadily. Now it is a specialist topic in history like others.

I doubt that there will be much interest in the Fleming Foundation.

And for Fleming, he goes raging, frothing, into the night. 

Thomas Fleming no longer president of the Rockford Institute. Still editor of "Chronicles" but some changes

Thomas Fleming is no longer the president of the Rockford Institute in Rockford, Illinois. He is still the editor of Chronicles Magazine.  He is important in the neo-Confederate movement for coming up with the idea for the Southern League, now known as the League of the South. http://www.leagueofthesouth.com but is no longer  a member.

He also was a founder of Southern Partisan, but left it after a couple years. Chronicles magazine under his leadership was a forum for neo-Confederates such on John Shelton Reed and others.

With the May 2015 issue of Chronicles magazine I notice that his article is just two pages. In the past it used to go to three pages mostly even though the print was denser.

Maybe it is just a shorter article. Or maybe Chronicles is going to be leaving the Confederate States of America. Though I do see a full page ad for the Abbeville Institute on the inside of the backcover. And there is announced a book "Life, Literature, and Lincoln" of the writings of Tom Landess.

However this could be the residual of Fleming's leadership and in the coming months there a different focus on hating Muslims, gays, minorities, liberals without the distraction of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy. Perhaps even in reactionary circles the "sell by date" for the Confederacy is past.

As the cliche says, "Time will tell."

Fleming's great project, neo-Confederate secession failed, there is just the laughable remnant of the League of the South. He can spend his forthcoming years raging against the future or to be more precise the Renaissance and what came after.

If society has huge troubles he will fell vindicated, even if his beliefs are irrelevant to these possible future problems, he will rationalize that the problems are because society didn't heed his warnings.

If I ever have a traffic accident, I suppose I could have avoided it by using a horse, or by staying home and not going anywhere.

As some reactionaries pass away or out of influence it is wrong to assume that a movement is passing away. Thomas Fleming and others like him continue a stream of thought going back centuries. There are younger people who will take his place. Though they may not be from the same background. I think the cohort of reactionary professors who still don't accept the civil rights movement are passing away.

In the larger scheme of things there will always be this movement for a hierarchical society will always continue and there will be a never ending struggle as long as humanity lives. Some times will be better, and lets hope the future brings a more equitable society and progress, but there will still be a struggle. There will always be a reservoir of reaction in society.

John Shelton Reed's seeming conspiracy against Martin Luther King

In 1995 I was indexing issues of Chronicles magazine, a publication of the Rockford Institute in Rockford, Illinois. The Rockford Institute had a campaign to discredit Martin Luther King. Up until about the mid-1990s John Shelton Reed contributed articles to Chronicles magazine where his homophobia was rather upfront and his racial attitudes were very very thinly veiled.

It turns out that sections of King's dissertations are copied from other works. At the time of the discovery in 1990 King was dead and so was the dissertation advisor.

What is interesting is that John Shelton Reed played a very key role in helping the Rockford Institute attack Martin Luther King. The articles in Chronicles also attacked Boston University and administrators there. So I wrote Peter Woods to find out more.

The following is an extract from the letter to me from Peter Wood, Provost of Boston University, July 19, 1995, which I have permission to use which shows the role of John Shelton Reed who is referred to as Dr. Reed.  Reed is an academic with a Ph.D.

Although you cannot rebut the substance of the allegations, there is probably something worth saying about the tactics and motives of Mr. Fleming, Dr. Reed, and their collaborators. When Dr. Reed wrote to Boston University President John Silber in May 1990 alleging that Dr. King committed plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation, he cited no source, offered no evidence, and made no specific claims. From Dr. Reed's letter, it was impossible to tell in in [if] Dr. King was being accused of plagiarizing two words, two paragraphs, or the whole dissertation, and he offered no clue as to whom Dr. King had allegedly plagiarized. 

 John Shelton Reed's essay in Chronicles some months latter repeated this technique of broadside allegation, so vague as to be uncheckable, but presented in a manner that suggested that it was a well-established fact. In retrospect, it appears that neither Dr. Reed nor Mr. Fleming had any real evidence, but Dr. Reed knew from his service at a National Endowment for the Humanities reviewer (where he apparently saw a confidential report from Dr. Carson about King's plagiarism) that there was something to hunt for. The trick was to avoid violating NEH confidentiality by dropping hints and hoping Boston University would make the discovery on its own. 

Perhaps there was more to it than that, but that is my best guess as to why Chronicles developed the story in such an odd manner before the article in The Wall Street Journal on November 9, 1990, in which clear and specific allegations and evidence were for the first time presented to the public. So much for tactics.

King is not honored because he was a great academic, but for his courage and vision in leading the civil rights movement. However, the neo-Confederates hoped to discredit King with this information. John Shelton Reed was working with them to do this.

It also shows the impact when neo-Confederates are placed in cultural institutions and bodies.

Mel Gibson given free pass by Neo-Confederates. Also, when bigots are not marginal members of society.

Incidentally the following is a great column by Tim Rutten in the "Los Angeles Times" about the people who gave the movie "The Passion" a free pass regarding anti-Semitism.

Click this link for article.

The Neo-Confederates are exonerating or explaining away or making excuses for Mel Gibson at these links. In some cases as time goes on you will have to look down the page or search for the word "Gibson."

The most interesting defense of Gibson is an essay by Thomas Fleming, stating:

"Theories of history are matters of fact and reason. The fact that so many troublemakers of the past 150 years have been of Jewish extraction—Marx, Freud, the Neoconservatives—is certainly no argument in their favor. Jewish “intellectuals” continue to be in the forefront of the movements that aim to destroy our religion and culture. "

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/ Has on their web page as the lead item an attack on the critics of Mel Gibson and an exposition that is fairly anti-Semitic in itself.

This is the direct link to the essay by Thomas Fleming, a former founding director of the League of the South, and leading Neo-Confederate.

www.cofcc.org The Council of Conservative Citizens has an item that Gibson has a Jewish body guard, so that means Gibson isn't aSemiticitic. This is a sort aSemiticitic parallel to the tactics of the Neo-Confederates parading around some African American who says he likes the Confederacy.

http://www.southerncaucus.org/ "Dixie Daily News" states that Gibson makes great movies and just made a mistake.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans sell a book, "The South Under Siege" which has whole chapters which I believe to be and I think most people would believe to be anti-Semitic.

https://scv.secure-sites.us/store.php?offset=50&cat=02

It is on page 6 of their catalog.

I blogged on the white supremacy of this book and you can read that part at this link.

http://newtknight.blogspot.com/2006/06/white-supremacy-promoted-by-sons-of.html

The Neo-Confederates aren't the only ones looking for some excuse to get Mel Gibson off the hook. Others are two.

The so-called anti-racism and opposition to bigotry in society is often just an opposition to marginal members of society, people who have a great social distance from ourselves, stirring up trouble. When someone who is a part of "us" is found out to be racist or bigoted the excuse machine is really cranked up for them. I discuss this in my paper "Breaking the White Nation."

www.templeofdemocracy.com/breaking.htm