The Weekly Sanfedisti

    Be warned that to be a Jacobite is a lonely existence, there are no jubilees or the commemorative merchandise that characterizes monarchies in the 21st century. There is but only a wistfulness to what might have been and a tiny hope that the true cause might be fulfilled. A good question to start with would be "What does a Jacobite believe in?", to put it simply we are monarchists generally from the anglosphere and paradoxically at least a plurality seem to be American although no in depth study has ever been concluded. What separates us is that we hold that in 1688 in the so called "Glorious Revolution" James II the king of England, was illegally overthrown by the Parliament and usurped by his daughter and son in law, also illegally. And because Parliament has no right to dethrone a reigning monarch, James II and his heirs are the true sovereigns of England, Scotland and Ireland. This also means by extension that the line of rulers since this usurpation is ille...

      On my second re-watch of the brilliant HBO miniseries "John Adams" one can see many of the proto-arguments that dominate the politics of today, whether that be the debate on the role of the States vis a vis the Federal Government or the role of government censorship. It's a nostalgic continuity that grounds viewers in two points, first that the republic is an extremely young one, and secondly, that they and us are not so different, the show takes place after all in the time of the grandparents of our grandparents grandparents, which is a blink compared to any considerable stretch in history. But there was a certain scene which stuck out as utterly foreign to my modern ears, an exchange between Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the titular John Adams in which Franklin argues that for the republic to survive it requires virtue and virtuous citizens.     The concept of virtue was one in vogue in the time of the enlightenment, drawing from the ancient ro...