“The muddle is not merely due to the sin of anger; that is, to people losing their tempers with each other. It is also due to the sin of sloth; to people not taking the trouble to listen to each other, or take note of what each other really says. My first point, therefore, is that sloth, intellectual sloth, as well as mere emotional anger, is a great modern foe to charity.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted, apparently from the BBC radio program “The Listener” in 1933, by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)

“Apparently, I must give you a lecture. I grimaced neither at your impudence nor at your sentiment, but at your diction and style. I condemn clichés, especially those that have been corrupted by fascists and communists. Such phrases as ‘great and noble cause’ and ‘fruits of their labour’ have been given an ineradicable stink by Hitler and Stalin and all their vermin brood. Besides, in this century of the overwhelming triumph of science, the appeal of the cause of human freedom is no longer that it is great and noble; it is more or less than that; it is essential. It is no greater or nobler than the cause of edible food or the cause of effective shelter. Man must have freedom or he will cease to exist as man. The despot, whether fascist or communist, is no longer restricted to such puny tools as the heel or the sword or even the machine gun; science has provided him weapons that can give him the planet; and only men who are willing to die for freedom have any chance of living for it.’”

Nero Wolfe to his adopted daughter for being reckless and romantic not practical in fighting for liberty in Rex Stout The Black Mountain

“Nazism was an attempt to lie beautifully to the German nation and to the world. The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is an alternative to the daily reality that would otherwise be a spiritual vacuum. It represents ‘fun’ and ‘excitement,’ energy and spectacle and above all ‘beauty.’ Kitsch replaces ethics with aesthetics. Kitsch is the mask of Death. Nazism was the ultimate expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing, death-dealing portent. Naziism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the reality of both was death. The Third Reich was the creation of ‘kitsch men,’ people who confused the relationship between life and art, reality and myth, and who regarded the goal of existence as mere affirmation, devoid of criticism, difficulty, insight. Their sensibility was rooted in superficiality, falsity, plagiarism, and forgery. Their art was rooted in ugliness. They took the ideals, though not the form, of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century avant-garde, and of the German nation in the Great War, and by means of technology – the mirror – they suited these ideals to their own purpose. Germany, the home of Dichter und Denker [Poets and thinkers], of many of the greatest cultural achievements of modern man, became in the Third Reich the home of Richter und Henker [Judges and hangmen]: the incarnation of kitsch and nihilism.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the American withdrawal from liberal global policeman isn’t some weird departure from their geopolitical traditions, it’s a return to business as usual pre-1945. It was the intervening 80 years that was extraordinary and if people valued it they should have been more helpful to and less unpleasant about the Pax Americana.

“Our particular corner of Christendom can now be taught the history of every civilisation except its own.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly December 13, 1934, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)

In my latest National Post column I say while it's necessary to denounce antisemitism, it's not sufficient. We must understand why and how this uniquely stubborn and wicked form of hatred spreads like a fungus, causing rot in all kinds of places including elite institutions.

In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that decades of immigration and investment policy based on mistaken and incoherent multiculturalism is predictably turning Canada into a low-trust society.

In my latest Epoch Times column I ponder the battling dispositions in public debate to refuse to believe things can be as bad as they seem, or to refuse to believe anything else, and the characteristic errors each can cause.