In my latest Loonie Politics column I say all the excitement about Zohran Mamdani is misplaced, not because he isn’t potentially important but because what matters isn’t whether he wins a primary or even the New York general mayoral election. It’s what happens if and when he tries to govern and what the result tells us about the soundness or insanity of his principles.

In my latest Epoch Times column I discuss the vexed question of where the government is going to find more than $100 billion extra to meet the defence spending commitment the Prime Minister blithely made.

“That the issue of sexual morality should become a vehicle of rebellion against bourgeois values for the modern movement was inevitable. In the art of Gustav Klimt, in the early operas of Richard Strauss, in the plays of Frank Wedekind, in the personal antics of Verlaine, Tchaikovsky, and Wilde, and even in the relaxed morality of the German youth movement, a motif of eroticism dominated the search for newness and change. In the United States Max Eastman shouted, ‘Lust is sacred!’ The sexual rebel, particularly the homosexual, became a central figure in the imagery of revolt, especially after the ignominious treatment Oscar Wilde received at the hands of the establishment. Of her Bloomsbury circle of gentle rebels Virginia Woolf said, ‘the word bugger was never far from our lips.’ Andre Gide, after a long struggle with himself, denounced publicly le mensonge des moeurs, the moral life, and admitted his own predilections. Passion and love, he had concluded, were mutually exclusive. And passion was much purer than love. Diaghilev’s sexual proclivities were well known, and he made no attempt to mask them; quite the reverse. Stravinsky said later that Diaghilev’s entourage was ‘a kind of homosexual Swiss Guard.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era [so the modern rebellion over the issue of sexual morality is actually stale and reactionary]

In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that even governments that talk about fiscal prudence are helpless to stem the tidal wave of overspending because they’re secretly convinced it stimulates the economy.

“In a recent British study of ‘happy’ professions, hairdressing topped the list, reports The Independent on Sunday. Next happiest were the clergy, chefs, beauticians, plumbers and mechanics.”

“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail October 6, 2005 [and it strikes me that of these professions all but the clergy work with their hands on physical objects]

“inevitably, to attempt the tracing of Christianity’s impact on the world is to cover the rise and fall of empires, the actions of bishops and kings, the arguments of theologians, the course of revolutions, the planting of crosses around the world. It is, in particular, to focus on the doings of men. Yet that hardly tells the whole story. I have written much in this book about churches, and monasteries, and universities; but these were never where the mass of the Christian people were most influentially shaped. It was always in the home that children were likeliest to absorb the revolutionary teachings that, over the course of two thousand years, have come to be so taken for granted as almost to seem human nature. The Christian revolution was wrought above all at the knees of women.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [in context of his own saintly though herself childless godmother, a teacher]

“Benito Mussolini, an erstwhile socialist whose reading of Nietzsche had led him, by the end of the Great War, to dream of forming a new breed of man, an elite worthy of a fascist state, cast himself both as Caesar and as the face of a gleaming future. From the fusion of ancient and modern, mounted by the white-hot genius of his leadership, there was to emerge a new Italy. Whether greeting the massed ranks of his followers with a Roman salute or piloting an aircraft, Mussolini posed in ways that consciously sought to erase the entire span of Christian history. Although, in a country as profoundly Catholic as Italy, he had little choice but to cede a measure of autonomy to the Church, his ultimate aim was to subordinate it utterly, to render it the handmaid of the fascist state. Mussolini’s more strident followers exalted nakedly in this goal. ‘Yes indeed, we are totalitarians! We want to be from morning to evening, without distracting thoughts.’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“In 2011, a cartoon of Muhammad appeared on the cover of Charlie Hebdo. The following year he was depicted crouching on all fours, his genitals bared. The mockery would not cease, so Charlie Hebdo’s editor vowed, until ‘Islam has been rendered as banal as Catholicism’. This it was, in a secular society, for Muslims to be treated as equals. Except that they were not being treated as equals. Only those who believed in the foundation myths of secularism – that it had emerged as though from a virgin birth, that it owed nothing to Christianity, that it was neutral between all religions – could possibly have believed that they were. In January 2015, after two gunmen had forced their way into the Charlie Hebdo offices and shot dead twelve of the staff, Muslim sensitivities were repeatedly weighed in the balance by a bewildered and frightened public, and found wanting. Why the murderous over-reaction to a few cartoons? Why, when Catholics had again and again demonstrated themselves capable of swallowing blasphemies directed against their faith, could Muslims not do the same? Was it not time for Islam to grow up and enter the modern world, just as Christianity had done? Yet to ask these questions was, of course, to buy into the core conceit of secularism: that all religions were essentially the same. It was to assume that they were bound, much like butterflies, to replicate an identical life cycle: reformation, enlightenment, decline. Above all, it was to ignore the degree to which the tradition of secularism upheld by Charlie Hebdo, far from emancipation from Christianity, was indelibly a product of it.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World