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.
“When Mr. Chesterton visited Warsaw recently the papers stated that he was accompanied from the station to his quarters by a squadron of glittering Polish cavalry: a pleasing attention, only his due, and one that I am sure he heartily appreciated. But a thoroughly adequate escort for him would include not merely armed horsemen, but cohorts of magicians, clowns, princesses, priests, kings, vegetarians, Puritans, drunkards, landlords, politicians, millionaires, minstrels out of which he has made the fairy-tale world of his poems. The fairy-tales always have a point; it was long ago said that Mr. Chesterton’s value as a moralist was largely based on the fact that he made virtue amusing. Yet even when he is most vigorously jousting against slimy monsters or caitiff knights his spear usually has a few balloons tied on to it, and can be used, when he tires of the more formal tourney, as a quarterstaff or even a slapstick. His jests are mingled with his protestations of anger and love … he has one foot in fairyland and another in Fleet Street …”
The now-forgotten J.C. Squire in 1927, quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
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.
“If your mother says she loves you, check it out. That’s what the old cigar-chewing night editors in the city room used to say when I was a cub.”
[My bibliographic note to myself for this one is “Evers MW” but there’s no such entry in my actual bibliographic file for any book I’ve read so I have no idea what it means. The sentiment is in any case widespread regarding old-time journalism.]
“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]
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask where the campus protests and encampments are over dreadful treatment of women and gays under in Afghanistan… even if you don’t get to blame Jews.
In a talk to the 2024 Economic Education Association of Alberta "Freedom Talk" in Red Deer, AB on July 7 I argue that a radical commitment to truth-telling, including refusing to remain silent in the face of lies, is crucial to personal and to political freedom.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the International Olympic Committee’s pseudo-apology for deliberately blaspheming the Last Supper was even more debauched than the initial performance.