“Her [biographer Catherine Tsalikis’s] admiration for [Chrystia] Freeland’s ambition is obvious. She paints her political views as centrist pragmatism. I would define them as aspirational progressivism. A desire for power exists; she wants to be ‘in the room where the decisions are made,’ but we don’t know why. Freeland’s ‘values’ are a confection of tasteful platitudes that signify status. One might call hers the Audi of ideologies: multiculturalism, globalization, and woke capital, all in the slipstream of careerism. Her insatiable appetite for status is the defining feature and likely her Achilles heel.”

Brad McKenzie reviewing Tsalikis’s Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)

“Many believed Lord Acton when he quipped that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This throwaway line has become one of our governing principles, so much so that Australia, and much of the West, organize virtually everything by committee and quail in the face of individual thumos outside of sport. We are suspicious of it. We see in every Great Man the shadow of the slave master. Nonetheless, power must be wielded... The wise man recognizes that life has fullest meaning in service to a good master, and that we all serve something — if not something or someone noble, then our appetites. Wartime is the most direct and prime example of service to masters; it is antiegalitarian in their sense, but egalitarian in ours, and together bound by duty and service in the most primordial sense. Against this the pseudo-liberated contemporary person feels a degree of contempt, which is why they enjoy stories of soldiers committing massacres so dearly. Nothing confirms their deepest-held beliefs more sordidly. Good masters are few and far between, because we no longer cultivate this ethic in our technocratic managerial elite. The truth is that in fleeing good masters we have not fled masters, but have merely ended up with bad ones. In attempting to achieve a self-reliant anarchy we have left open the door to those who are in fact most corruptible by power.”

Christopher Jolliffe “The Attack on ANZAC Day” in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)

“A medley of spiteful mutants united behind a Leninist project can only be a wholly destructive force, and those of us who cleave to notions of Being with more permanence feel alienated and betrayed by our recently-elevated bad masters. We should not be surprised that they have the deculturalizing effect of rampaging orcs. They are barbarians, and as Chesterton said, the barbarian creates only by accident. Everything else they do is destruction.”

Christopher Jolliffe “The Attack on ANZAC Day” in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)

“Much history-telling casts our ancestors as stupid or villainous, who deserve our pity and scorn accordingly. This helps us swallow contemporary notions of ourselves, which are unheroic and uninteresting.”

Christopher Jolliffe “The Attack on ANZAC Day” in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)

“Under a massive and increasing national debt, the economy has stagnated. Taxes have gone up and productivity is stagnant. Resource industries are throttled. There will be more Canadians but poorer. Not referred to in any of these books is the Orwellian censorship legislation recently brought in. Or the taking of the legacy media into wardship with multiple subsidies. All this results from the man nominally in charge being an airhead with no conception of, or interest in, his responsibilities. From all we knew of him from the day of his birth, there was no reason to expect any better of him, but millions were taken in, and media who looked on politics as a game, or even entertainment, encouraged them.”

John Pepall in Dorchester Review #29 (Vol. 14 #3 Autumn 2024)

“When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in November 2016 an immediate reaction in the media, among Democrats and discomforted Republicans, and many besides, was that he should not be ‘normalized’. That such an ignorant, intemperate, corrupt buffoon was President was an enormity that was to the country’s shame and must be resisted. When Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister in November 2015 there was no such reaction in Canada. That a callow young man who had led a meandering life, who had never shown any interest in government, who was evidently both conceited and silly, should be Prime Minister simply because he had been famous since shortly after his conception, was nice looking, and was the son of a man who had been a bad Prime Minister for fifteen years over 30 years before, should sweep the country in the 2015 election was shameful. No one seems to have noticed.”

John Pepall in Dorchester Review #29 (Vol. 14 #3 Autumn 2024)

In my latest Dorchester Review article I say Mark Carney would make our politics worse not better.