“There is no law of geography which dictates that it would be impossible for all the inhabitable areas of the earth to lie in latitudes, and be subject to physical conditions, of the type that produced the Asian empires…. Indeed, how can any ‘rigorous’ theory account for Britain’s being an island, a fact that has certainly contributed most importantly to the world’s social and political development. Its insulation was the merest accident on any rational time scale, dating from some ten thousand years ago, a geological instant.”

Robert Conquest in Reflections on a Ravaged Century, critiquing the narrowness of Marx’s development theory.

In my latest National Post column I contrast various Ontario school boards’ grudging admission that some misguided students might celebrate the Queen with their mandatory embrace of every progressive occasion or pseudo-occasion.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Pierre Poilievre’s overwhelming victory in the Conservative leadership contest, and Jean Charest’s hollow showing, demonstrates yet again that snobbery is no antidote to populism.

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