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Last month saw the thirtieth anniversary of the death of one of my favorite conservative thinkers, Russell Kirk, back in April 1994. Very possibly Kirk enjoyed the process of passing away into another world, as his conservative beliefs were partly inspired by a lifelong belief in the paranormal.

According to Kirk, his ancestral home of Piety Hill in Michigan was one of the most haunted houses in America, filled with apparitions, disembodied voices, mysterious raps and knocks, self-playing instruments, and an elderly relative who would levitate in her rocking chair. But what did such alleged experiences have to do with politics?

Political Postmortem
Kirk was best known for his 1953 book The Conservative Mind, which celebrated the combined thoughts of the Anglosphere’s leading Tory-type brains, notably the 18th-century statesman Edmund Burke. Burke spoke of there being a direct living chain in existence within all sensible, tradition-respecting societies like the Britain of his day, which linked together the dead with the living and those as yet unborn. However, any civilization foolish enough to begin forgetting or repudiating its ancestors was ultimately doomed to violent chaos and destruction, as in Revolutionary-era France, taught Burke, and Russell Kirk agreed.

In Kirk’s view, one of the best ways of ensuring we did not neglect our ancestors was to continue seeing their ghosts. One sign of a politically healthy and free society was that its people kept on reporting paranormal encounters on a regular basis: It was no coincidence that England, home of both Magna Carta and a traditional monarchy alike, was popularly said to be the most haunted country in the world.

Any land within which ghosts stopped appearing was in severe trouble: Cut off from its ancestral roots, it would soon wither and die, as in Maoist China of the Cultural Revolution period. Here, radicalized Red Guard schoolkids were urged to fight the “Four Olds” of Ideas, Culture, Customs, and Habits, by torturing their parents and teachers, digging up corpses, toppling statues, maniacally renaming buildings and streets, or raiding museums and libraries and burning all the contents, to disastrous social effect.

Red Guards, one would imagine, rarely saw any ghosts at all. Why? Because, as Kirk once wrote, “To have ghosts, one must have a past for ghosts to emerge from” in the first place.

Revolutionary Spirits
Lefties are meant to be progressives: They look forward in time, not backward. Conservatives like Kirk are the precise opposite.

Today, the “progressive” Maoist Cultural Revolution has been reborn anew in our own Marxism-captured schools and universities, where, far from teaching kids to respect their ancestors, they are taught to ritually shit upon them from a very great height: Washington was a slave owner, Churchill was a wog-starver, Jesus was a queer-baiter, etc., etc., ad infinitum. If this was our evil, racist, utterly irredeemable past, goes today’s cartoon campus line of reasoning, then we wouldn’t want to see the returning spirits of any such worthless individuals anyhow.

Awkwardly for the contemporary left, however, Americans stubbornly continue to report seeing ghosts nonetheless. According to one survey from 2019, Republican voters are somewhat more likely to believe in ghosts, at 46 percent, compared with 41 percent of Democrats—but 41 percent is still a hefty proportion of lefties, is it not?

As such, another anti-spook tactic has to be adopted by today’s radical Red Guard left. Rather than eliminating the prevailing false consciousness of belief in ghosts, why not simply morally discredit all such entities by painting them as a bunch of postmortem racist bigots instead? If you can’t exorcize the dead, why not just cancel them?

The Government In-Specter
You do get the occasional reported case of a full-blown racist ghost: In 2000, a black Detroit couple claimed a poltergeist was sending them “racially charged hate messages” through the audio-captioning service of their TV set, leading to an actual FBI investigation.

One of America’s most famous ghosts, the 19th-century Bell Witch, was supposed to be notorious for hating local black slaves. “I despise to smell a nigger, the scent makes me sick,” it once purportedly complained, an excellent potential advertising line for selling deodorant products in the Chicago, Washington, Baltimore, and Portland areas some 200 years later.

Yet stories about poltergeists calling people coons just seem a bit too far-fetched even for those 2020s Democrat voters gullible enough to believe that trans women are women, or that we only have ten years left to save the planet, so an alternative, superficially more plausible tactic of tarring ghosts as racist is to begin depicting parapsychology itself as an unacceptably “white space” instead.

Academic humanities modules are seeping like stale ectoplasm into university syllabuses across the land, bearing titles like “English 321—Ghosts and the Undead: Racial Hauntings in American Literature,” taught at the State University of New York College of Technology from 2020 onward. The basic idea of such course content is that, in truth, the REAL ghost America is haunted by today is the ghost of its evil past, not the Bell Witch or the Amityville Horror: Students in English 321 can learn all about the dreaded “Specter of Racism” by reading spooky novels featuring emotionally overwrought descriptions of the phantoms of dead plantation slaves and suchlike.

The course also apparently teaches students how to become politically psychic and thereby spot “Institutional Hauntings in Contemporary U.S. Culture”—like Puritan-age Witchfinders General once being taught to sniff out invisible demons lurking everywhere in the world around them, the new Wokefinders General of tomorrow will be able to divine the equally intangible demons of institutional racism lurking everywhere around them too.

The Fentanyl Phantom
One place English 321 particularly recommends sniffing out the possessing cacodemons of systemic racism is in the U.S. prison and criminal justice systems—where the chief presiding spirit is no doubt that of George Floyd.

It is now exactly four years since George became a ghost himself, on 25 May 2020, and within weeks he was already speaking from The Other Side through the voice of a white spirit-medium…who was subsequently automatically condemned as a racist. Channeler Carol Collins said George had sent her the urgent message that, with riots breaking out across America, he did not wish his name to be “associated with hate” like that of the protesters, arguing that “civil liberties are not what we need to be fighting for.” Instead, George advised BLM mobs to become “the one who says ‘I love you’ to all,” even neck-kneeling whitey.

Such conveniently anti-BLM messages were quickly linked by eager academics back to the days of 19th-century Spiritualism, when white U.S. mediums had apparently developed quite a habit of channeling dead black slaves who continued to call their owners “dear massa” whilst expressing suspiciously fond memories of their former lives of labor on plantations.

According to Timothy Worrad of the U.K.’s University of Newcastle, such messages were merely used by lying white fake mediums “to ventriloquize victims of racial violence, advance reactionary political messages, and undermine calls for institutional change” by implying that even the dead in heaven accepted slavery as part of the natural order of things. Privileged white mediums get to decide which dead people get to speak at all, you see, and what they actually say when they do so—i.e., generally not Malcolm X yelling, “Shoot all the honkies!”

Academic Exorcizes
Pathetically, some leftists have now begun studying the demographics of ghosts, finding that, as in so many other areas, non-whites are severely underrepresented. Pained paranormal op-eds asking where all the ghosts of blacks and Indians have got to are now starting to appear, whilst professional academic folklorists like Dr. Andrea Kitta of East Carolina University are beginning to publish shroud-waving articles with absurd titles like “Why Are Ghosts So White?” I chose that for the title of this present piece as a joke, thinking it the most retarded angle on this present subject I could possibly think of, then typed it into Google just in case…and found I’d already been beaten to it.

Dr. Kitta teaches a popular class called “The Supernatural,” which she appears to run as a kind of anti–Russell Kirk. As Kitta says, “ghosts give us a sense of history”—but, for a modern-day left-wing university professor, a “sense of history” is an inherently bad thing, as, by linking us back to the past in such a sickeningly Burkean fashion, such evil entities only “reinforce every single stereotype that we work so hard to deconstruct.”

Kitta’s class appears to consist of her getting students to hang around in her office and discuss their own personal paranormal encounters within a designated “safe space,” presumably a pentagram-containing circle of salt—but still the students “have trouble discussing why all of these ghosts [they see] are so white and why the rare ghosts of color are stereotypes of stereotypes.”

Local white people in East Carolina have ghosts of all kinds—phantom florists, trombonists, subatomic physicists, tree surgeons, mime artists, everything—whereas black ghosts are usually just dead slaves or lynching victims (although Kitta claims to know of a dead black maidservant who compliantly continues to fold up white students’ clothes and tidy them away in the form of a racially obedient poltergeist). This, says Kitta, “is surprising,” as the local living population actually contains “large Latinx, Indigenous and Black communities,” so where are all the ghosts of deceased leaf blowers, box dwellers, welfare recipients, and drug dealers, as you may reasonably expect to find? Nowhere, because “Even the structure of these narratives has the clear mark of whiteness in it.”

The White Lady
Risibly, Dr. Kitta takes her students on trips to European cities, purely in order to demonstrate how hideously white all their wraiths are:

“Even when I take students abroad to London to talk about ghosts there, the ghosts are white. London, one of the most multicultural cities in the world, is filled with white ghosts. The ghosts of queens and princes…theatre ghosts, but all white ghosts…. The ghosts of London often match what the students think of London: all double-decker buses, royalty, and beefeaters.”

But what else would the ghosts of London be? Rastafarians? Muezzins? Taoist priests? Turkish janissaries? England’s ghosts would be mostly white, wouldn’t they, as England’s past is mostly white too, at least until about five minutes ago, on a spectral timescale. It would be impossible to have ghosts of black English “queens and princes” when there were none before Meghan Markle, whose ghost sadly can’t haunt London as she regrettably is not dead yet.

But this doesn’t matter, says Kitta: “We need to face these ghosts, who demand we acknowledge our true history, and spend more time exploring the ghosts that we don’t know about.” What, you mean the “ghosts” of people who never actually lived, like a 16th-century black Muslim Prince of Wales, or a Victorian-era Cherokee Speaker of the House of Lords? Skeptics have long claimed ghosts do not really exist: These ones certainly don’t.

The left are always trying to rewrite our past along dubious racial lines, but I never thought they’d go so far as to start engineering a demographic Great Replacement of our ghosts too! Russell Kirk must be rolling in his grave.