“Atlas Shrugged makes no sense to me: the good people I know [rich or poor] are not stingy with their skills and expertise or whatever contributions they can make – whether prayer, money, or time – toward the common good. I know this as a fact. It is the characters in Atlas Shrugged who opt out (sometimes with much hand wringing) who are by definition the second rate. From knowing so many good people, I knew Atlas Shrugged was bunk. But I was wrong – in an oblique way this book was prophetic, but it was not Atlas who had shrugged; the world sitting on Atlas’s shoulders decided to jump off. Two years ago in Canada, every institution in Canadian society rejected the help of their many dedicated volunteers, and outlawed public participation in clubs, amateur sports, education, and religious observance. Any gatherings of five or more were prohibited, even in our homes. Christmas and Easter were cancelled. Sunday Mass was cancelled. Religious services were outlawed; whereas liquor stores, pot shops, big box stores, and professional sports were all kept open. The lines of demarcation were obvious, if it freely benefited families, helped the elderly, or made life better for people it was cancelled. Youth curling? Gone. House league hockey? Gone. Public arenas? Locked. Public pools? Public parks? Public walking trails? Shut down, access blocked with padlocks and chains, patrolled by the police. People, including children, who dared ride a bike, skate on a patch of ice, slide down a hill on cardboard or skateboard in an empty parking lot were fined, sometimes pushed violently to the ground, and often arrested. Funerals, weddings, baptisms, first communions – these were outlawed. All of our social, religious, and media institutions collaborated. A few Christian congregations resisted and their pastors were arrested, sometime just for reading the Bible outdoors. The City of Toronto (among others) opened up snitch lines so people could report anyone who celebrated Christmas or Easter. Those who questioned even the more extreme capitulations to dictatorship were pilloried in the press for being anti-science. However, there were still children to raise, people who needed encouraging, teen-agers who needed to learn and play, swim, and play music. Spontaneously, without any central organization, house league hockey was re-started by invitation only, on frozen ponds and rinks behind barns and hedges away from the searching eyes of both officialdom and vindictive neighbors. At our home we raised the height of the fence so people could not see into our yard from the road, which allowed us to host Euchre tournaments, and Christmas feasts, live music events, with visitors parking behind a large woodpile away from view. Everywhere, priests said Mass in private homes with time-and-place communicated by word of mouth to those who could be trusted to keep quiet.”

David Beresford in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)

“Without freedom of speech, we would not know who the idiots are.”

Emailed without attribution by a friend May 28, 2024

Today on The Alex Pierson Show on Global News Radio 640 Toronto I called the decision a vindication of the free society, and Zuckerberg’s explanation remarkably clear and frank.

This week I was on the National Post “Full Comment” podcast with Brian Lilley to talk about Donald Trump, Canada, and the sometimes unruly revenge of normal people.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I take up my dusty cudgel on the crucial point that our whole system of government crumples if the legislators we elect cannot control the executive we do not elect. It was true in the days of Bad King John and George III, and it’s true in those of Justin Trudeau.

“To speak of Dickens is to think of Bumble the beadle, and that carries our mind at once to a whole crowd of thick-headed magistrates, interfering philanthropists, tyrannical administrators of the Poor Law, and the like. Have you ever noticed the fact that in Dickens, in Shakespeare, in Fielding, in the whole range of English literature, a person in petty authority, a minor official hardly ever appears, except to be made ridiculous? There seems to be a deep conviction in our minds that the man who carries some wand of office is more likely than other men to be half knave and wholly fool.”

Transcript from the improbably surviving one of two records used to transport C.S. Lewis’s May 1941 talk to Icelanders, which we don’t even know if it was ever broadcast, quoted in Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

“If you think wrong, you go wrong.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News September 12, 1914, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008)

“the waters are always smoothest and even most polished when they pour over the precipice.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist in “Chesterton University” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022) [with particular reference to those topics on which polite society and the Establishment stifle debate]