Posts in Government
Words Worth Noting - June 19, 2024

“Antisemitism is both a sort of mental impairment and a barrier to learning. If you think that ‘the Jews’ control the banks, you don’t understand finance, and will never understand it because you have this happy conspiracy theory and you think you already know everything. If you think ‘the Jews’ control the weather with their space lasers, you’re not going to bother to study meteorological science. A society in which this kind of antisemitism is prevalent is not going to be a sign of a society on the cutting edge of science or business or economics or anything else. In our society, these beliefs are toxic. They’re terrible for Jews, but they are actually poison to what makes America, America.”

Walter Russell Mead in conversation with Bari Weiss on The Free Press October 31, 2023 [https://www.thefp.com/p/are-we-tipping-into-world-war-three].

Words Worth Noting - June 12, 2024

“I do not seriously propose to interpret Distributism in the sense of One Man One Musket: or even to go to the country with a programme of Three Acres and a Machine-Gun. But I do think that, for any one with a historical imagination and sense of symbolism, there is a certain connection between the old notion of private weapons and the true notion of private property. In that aspect, the other name of Distributism is Self-Defence.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly April 4, 1931, quoted in “Chesterton’s Mail Bag” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)

A Tale of Two Revolutions

In a talk to the Augustine College Summer Seminar I argued that the American Revolution brought liberty and prosperity because it looked back to the solid foundations of Magna Carta, Christianity and the Western tradition, while the French Revolution brought misery and death because it looked forward to a utopian future unconstrained by the past.

Words Worth Noting - June 5, 2024

“As Justice Jamie Campbell once wrote, ‘The Charter is not a blueprint for moral conformity. Its purpose is to protect the citizen from the power of the state, not to enforce compliance by citizens or private institutions with the moral judgements of the state.’ Trinity Western University v. Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society, 2015 NSSC25, at para. 10. Sadly, this clear thinking was not followed by a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada in a similar case, where seven of nine judges ruled against Trinity Western University’s proposed Christian law school due to a perception the law school would discriminate against non-Christians.”

André Schutten and Michael Wagner, A Christian Citizenship Guide 2nd edition