In my latest Epoch Times column I say we should be very wary of proposals from people who express angry ignorance about our Constitutional monarchy, including “republicans” who have no idea what a republic actually is.

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the goal of Parliamentary redistricting should be improving government not indulging a penchant for regional bickering. Happily, adding a lot more MPs will help achieve the former and avoid the latter.

“As the historian Forrest McDonald pointed out, Filmer never persuaded anyone by eloquence or logic, since he possessed neither.”

Richard Brookheiser in National Review February 22, 1999 [Filmer being the 17th-century English Tory essayist Robert Filmer, the target of John Locke’s now mostly unread First Treatise of Government, which is now mostly unread in significant measure because it demolished Filmer so completely that nobody now remembers him]

In my latest Loonie Politics column I praise Mikhail Gorbachev for the fundamental decency that led him to permit the peaceful dissolution of Soviet Communism. But I insist that he was no statesman, and no thinker, and that credit for ending the Cold War properly belongs with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and their supporters.

“As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”

James Madison, quoted by Christopher Buckley in National Review November 22, 1999

In my latest Epoch Times column I explain why we talk a lot less about free speech than we used to, and a lot less convincingly.

“I invite the reader’s attention to the much more serious consideration [than myths in very early history] of the kind of lives our ancestors lived, of who were the men, and what the means both in politics and war by which Rome’s power was first acquired and subsequently expanded; I would then have him trace the process of our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.”

Titus Livius (“Livy”) The Early History of Rome

In my latest Loonie Politics column I draw on the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton to unravel the attitudes of populist and their opponents to accountability.