“Our youth are impatient with the preliminaries that are essential to purposeful action. Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change, or as I have phrased it elsewhere the demand for revelation rather than revolution. It's the kind of thing we see in playwriting; The first act introduces the characters and the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are developed as the place drives to hold the audience’s attention. In the final act good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution. The present generation wants to go right into the third act, skipping the first two, in which case there is no play, nothing but confrontation for confrontation’s sake – a flare up and back to darkness. To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that's the way the game is played – if you want to play and not just yell, ‘Kill the umpire.’ What is the alternative to working ‘inside’ the system? A mess of rhetorical garbage about ‘Burn the system down!’ Yippie yells of ‘Do it!’ or ‘Do your thing.’ What else? Bombs? Sniping? Silence when police are killed and screams of ‘murdering fascist pigs’ when others are killed? Attacking and baiting the police? Public suicide?”

“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“The climax of The Lord of the Rings [he refers to the siege of Minas Tirith] palpably echoed the momentous events of 955: the attack on Augsburg and the battle of the Lech. A wise and battle-seasoned scholar, consecrated in his mission by a supernatural power, standing in the gateway of a breached city and blocking the enemy’s advance. An army of mail-clad horsemen arriving to contend the battlefield just as the invaders seemed to have victory in their grasp. A king armed with a sacred weapon, laying claim to an empty imperial throne. In 2003, a film of The Lord of the Rings had brought Aragorn's victory over the snarling hordes of Mordor to millions who had never heard of the battle of the Lech. Burnished and repackaged for the twenty-first century, Otto’s defense of Christendom still possessed a spectral glamour. Its legacy, though, that summer of 2014, was shaded by multiple ironies. Otto’s mantle was taken up not by the chancellor of Germany, but by the Prime Minister of Hungary. Viktor Orbán had until recently been a self-avowed atheist; but this did not prevent him from doubting – much as Otto might have done – whether unbaptized migrants could ever truly be integrated. ‘This is an important question, because Europe and European culture have Christian roots.’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that the dominant feature of federal policy nowadays isn’t Carney’s ill-concealed radical leftism, it’s unconcealed but widely overlooked massive incompetence. Almost nothing’s actually working, good or bad, and the soothing spin just makes it worse.

“Why does the perfect social state always seem to be a state of perfect boredom stiffened only by self-righteousness?”

G.K. Chesterton in London Magazine August 1924, quoted in “Why Do You Ask Me Rhetorical Questions? 6” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

On the 9th Hour podcast I joined theatre artist Breanna Doyle and host Charley to discuss heroes and villains in history, finding truth among shifting interpretations, and what it means for us today.

In my latest National Post column I ponder the gulf between the economic deregulation Canada needs and the inexplicably popular wordy but vacuous dirigisme of the Carney administration.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I denounce the Canadian habit of putting up with meaningless rhetoric from politicians with nonsensical jobs.

“It is psychologically impossible, when we hear real scientific statistics, not to think that they mean something. Generally they mean nothing. Sometimes they mean something that isn’t true.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 18, 1905, quoted in “Statistics” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)