In my latest National Post column I say the best way to get universities to stop promoting malevolent radicalism and start teaching again, and to promote actual social justice as well, is to privatize them and see what kind of education the young adults who will supposedly benefit from it are actually willing to pay full price for.
“At one extreme is the view of the historian Thomas Carlyle: ‘Universal history, the history of what man [sic] has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.’”
Jared Diamond Guns, Germs, and Steel
In 1922 Chesterton in London “gave another talk on Socialism where he said his primary objection to socialism was that ‘it would be a dictatorship, with a tyranny of officials in every department of life.’”
“100 Years Ago” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021) [and if Chesterton, a Christian apologist and fiction writer, could see it so clearly, why couldn’t politicians, pundits and professors?]
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say much of the left was caught offside on Hamas because ideas have consequences and they have embraced ones that lead to terrible places.
“The Reformation was no more the work of one man than any such upheaval can ever be; but without Luther there would still have been no Reformation.”
Geoffrey Elton Reformation Europe 1517-1559
“Quite honestly, I can’t imagine how anyone can say: ‘I’m weak,’ and then remain so. After all, if you know it, why not fight against it, why not try to train your character? The answer was: ‘Because it’s so much easier not to!’ This reply rather discouraged me. Easy? Does that mean that a lazy, deceitful life is an easy life? Oh, no, that can’t be true, it mustn’t be true, people can so easily be tempted by slackness... and by money.”
The diary entry for July 6, 1944 in The Diary of Anne Frank [prompted by a conversation with Peter Van Daan who said he thought he might later become a criminal or a gambler]
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the latest attack on Israel exposes Hamas starkly as an offence against man and God … along with anyone that supports or excuses it, Islamic Jihad or any such genocidal antisemitic organization or government.
“I call these men [the Framers of the Constitution] heroes in deliberate defiance of the ban placed upon this word by most serious-minded historians. By hero I mean a leader of men who engages with clear eye and stout heart in an uncertain enterprise for some purpose larger than the gratification of his own ambition or the rewarding of his own friends, and whose deeds work a benevolent influence on the lives of countless other men.”
Clinton Rossiter The Grand Convention (and it was written in 1966 so this morale-destroying ban has been in place for a long time).