Posts in Government
Words Worth Noting - March 3, 2026

“Compromise, in its sound and noble sense, used to mean the ignoring of small points in order to combine upon a large point; now it means ignoring large points in order to combine on small ones.”

G.K. Chesterton in Black & White, Mar. 7, 1903, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)

The Epstein ethos

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say someone like Jeffrey Epstein could only be a well-connected insider rather than a depraved and marginal freak in the strange modern Big Brother at the Playboy Mansion ethos of endless laws and regulations restricting our liberty combined with libertine social and especially sexual permissiveness.

Words Worth Noting - February 27, 2026

“Incidents of political violence in America have been steadily ticking upwards for years.... among the general public, a poisonous and dangerous stew is bubbling, composed of ideologues, fanatics, antisemites, obsessives, mentally ill people and others being whipped up by the incitement relentlessly spewed out on social media. This is fuelling a culture that’s now descended into anarchy, nihilism, loss of reason and a total disappearance of moral compass.”

Melanie Phillips September 12, 2025 [https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/a-shocking-watershed-for-america] [and NB while I agree with her on everything else the insertion of “ideologues” into her list as usual just muddies the waters]

Words Worth Noting - February 20, 2026

“The division now is between those who want Western Civilization to continue and those who don’t... this is the moment when the West will either pull itself together or go over the edge of the cultural cliff.”

Melanie Phillips in The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, quoted by Chuck Chalberg reviewing the book in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)

Words Worth Noting - February 19, 2026

“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)