In my closing remarks to the 2024 Economic Education Association of Alberta “Freedom Talk” conference in Red Deer on “The Decline of Western Civilization: Our Fate or Our Choice?” I urged people to go forth with joyful hope.
“he was using platitudes to fight stereotypes on behalf of a cliché.”
David Klinghoffer on Edward Zwick, director of The Siege, in National Review Dec. 7, 1998
“When the tide is receding from the beach it is easy to have the illusion that one can empty the ocean by removing water with a pail.”
Rene Dubos, quoted in Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emergent Diseases in a World out of Balance
“No good was ever done by one-sided controversy.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness August 2, 1918, quoted in “Chesterton For Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
In a wide-ranging discussion with David Leis of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy we talked about the Middle East, the rot in Canadian academia, the collapse of governance, the revolt of the elites against Western civilization and more besides… including how to fix things.
In my latest National Post column I say Calgary’s current water problems are emblematic of how progressive politicians don’t just engage in zany symbolic antics, they wreck cities and countries in zany ways.
In my latest Mercatornet column I ask how the United States, of all places, could have become vulnerable to tyranny.
“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].