“When there are people who espouse the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy or the Tate murders or the Marin County Courthouse kidnappings and killings or the University of Wisconsin bombing and killing as ‘revolutionary acts,’ then we are dealing with people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask.”
Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [he also warns that it is counterproductive, disgusting and scaring normal people].
In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that the dominant feature of federal policy nowadays isn’t Carney’s ill-concealed radical leftism, it’s unconcealed but widely overlooked massive incompetence. Almost nothing’s actually working, good or bad, and the soothing spin just makes it worse.
“In a world where everything is so inter related that one feels helpless to know where or how grab hold and act, defeat sets in; for years there have been people who found society too overwhelming and have withdrawn, concentrated on ‘doing their own thing.’ Generally we have put them into mental hospitals and diagnosed them as schizophrenics. If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.... As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be – it is necessary to begin where the world is if we're going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system. There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.”
“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals
In my latest National Post column I ponder the gulf between the economic deregulation Canada needs and the inexplicably popular wordy but vacuous dirigisme of the Carney administration.
“Il y a des folies qui se prennent comme les maladies contagieuses.”
La Rochefoucauld Maximes [Réflexions morales #300]
In my latest National Post column I expand on Chris Selley’s alarming insight that Canadian politicians and voters consistently act as if nothing mattered.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I take aim at the 20th-anniversary Harper revisionist rationalizations that he never intended to implement conservative policies, just build a winning party… which he didn’t even do anyway.
“Now this modern refusal to undo what has been done is not only an intellectual fault; it is a moral fault also. It is not merely our mental inability to understand the mistake we have made. It is also our spiritual refusal to admit that we have made a mistake.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted in stand-alone box without further attribution in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)