George Case's Blog

The archetypes of the vampire, the witch, and the black magician continue to enthrall us, not least of all because their authenticity has been traced back to verified figures from history. Gilles de Rais (c. 1404-1440), Vlad the Impaler (c. 1431-1476), and Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614) have each been cited as the all-too-real sources of horror […]

As early as his 1940 essay “The Lion and the Unicorn,” George Orwell shut down the original “what about” arguments with which progressives tried to shrug off the danger of a supposed geopolitical opponent, in this case Adolf Hitler:  “The intellectuals who are so fond of balancing democracy against totalitarianism and ‘proving’ that one is […]

This week marks the 60th anniversary of Time magazine’s famous cover story, “Is God Dead?” Today, as newspapers and magazines struggle for readership and relevance, it’s hard to imagine how a weekly print journal could much affect popular sentiment, but in April 1966 Time was virtually an arbiter of middlebrow American opinion and morals.   […]

A timely companion to former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s 2025 memoir, When the Going Was Good (which I previously reviewed), is the same year’s Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America, by Michael Grynbaum. Empire of the Elite covers much of the same ground as Carter, but with […]

You don’t have to be a fan of classic rock music to enjoy the brilliant 1984 “mockumentary” This Is Spinal Tap – in fact, it probably helps if you dislike it some. But I breezed through director Rob Reiner’s 2025 book A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap (released to […]

The notion of Jewish manipulators secretly controlling the world dates back at least as far as the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in 1903, and through the first half of the Twentieth Century. American industrialist Henry Ford and American radio broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin claimed that US finance and publishing were directed […]

There was a revealing detail in US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech before the Munich Security Conference on February 14.  Widely interpreted as a conciliatory message to Europeans rattled by the America-First aggressions of the Trump administration, Rubio assured the attendees that the United States and Europe “are bound to one another by the […]

My oddest experience with Freedom to Read Week, the annual anti-censorship campaign observed in Canada from February 22 to February 28 this year, came during my stint in a Vancouver book shop.  I was enlisted to collect a stack of titles to put in the storefront display along with a poster and other bumf announcing […]

While February 14 is a special day for couples and the courting, the commercialized hype of romance represented by Valentine’s Day may be unwelcome to involuntary singles and the otherwise lovelorn. Fortunately, perhaps, there are lots of classic musical expressions that capture the heartache of lost or unrequited loves – and perhaps, for the length […]