“King James [VI of Scotland/I of England] was a man, the Venetian ambassador remarked, ‘with a wonderful capacity for doing himself harm.’”

Catherine Drinker Bowen The Lion and the Throne

In my latest National Post column I say Justin Trudeau’s reflexive effort to bypass parliamentary self-government in a crisis was dangerous as well as foolish.

In my other speech to the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June, and again I apologize for the delay in getting it edited and posted, I talked about what classical Greece and Rome got right about political freedom and what they did not, how medieval England completed the picture with Magna Carta to limit government in theory and parliament to limit it in practice, and how and why things went wrong in the modern world.

Here’s a video from the past. It’s a talk I gave at the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June 2019 so I’m tardy making it available. And it’s about the Middle Ages which were, far too many people think, necessarily awful because they were long ago and old is bad and new is good. In fact there are a great many modern horrors that would have appalled people in the Middle Ages and one of them is widespread ignorance about the period.

Sorry to take so long to get around to editing and posting it. Life got in the way.

“Above all, we must insist, as against the utopian concepts, that a tolerable order of things is one of a proper balance between the social and the individual: that a human being is neither an ant nor a shark.”

Introduction in Robert Conquest Reflections on a Ravaged Century

In my latest Epoch Times column I call the British election more evidence that globalism isn’t working for ordinary people not because of “neoliberalism” but because of a swollen state and chaotic society whose complex rules favour the cosmopolitan elite that designed them.