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.
“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]
“A medley of spiteful mutants united behind a Leninist project can only be a wholly destructive force, and those of us who cleave to notions of Being with more permanence feel alienated and betrayed by our recently-elevated bad masters. We should not be surprised that they have the deculturalizing effect of rampaging orcs. They are barbarians, and as Chesterton said, the barbarian creates only by accident. Everything else they do is destruction.”
Christopher Jolliffe “The Attack on ANZAC Day” in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)
“The Hero does not regard the forest in which the dragon lurks as evil. Nor do I. I find that the world is on the whole a very jolly place, with inns and good fellowship. But try to justify the distinction: the good forest, the evil dragon; and you must have a philosophy.”
G.K. Chesterton in an interview with W.R. Titterton, in Titterton’s GKC: A Portrait (1936), the first Chesterton biography, reprinted in part at least in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“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)
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.
“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)
“If you leave your children a world where you never stood up, they’ll inherit one where they can’t.”
Emailed as an image and without attribution by a friend Sept. 8, 2025