Asperities
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We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.
September 8, 2024
12 mins
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As the Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde said some years ago, 'Populism is an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism'. When the voters insist that something isn’t working, as the recent EU Parliament election demonstrates, it is this commitment to raw democracy that manifests itself at the ballot box
August 25, 2024
10 mins
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Caricatures of left-wing authoritarians have been a feature of popular culture -- including not only farces but also such sophisticated comedies as Yes, Prime Minister -- and they awaken an immediate echo in their mass audiences. There’s a reason for that. We’ve all met the leftoid sorts with jackboot inclinations
June 14, 2024
9 mins
The latest
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If something doesn’t exist in theory, can it exist in […]
May 27, 2024
9 mins
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Partisan reporters -- is there any other sort these days? -- seek to persuade readers of various general truths rather than merely report what comes their way. Ireland's landslide rejection in early March of two woke referendums illustrates the gulf between what voters are told they should believe and what they actually do
April 2, 2024
9 mins
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Michael Mann’s lawyer told the Washington DC jury that finding against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg would vindicate their progressive sympathies and dissuade others from critiquing the methods and conduct of warmist science. And that’s what the panel did, treating the case as an opportunity to punish climate heresy. If this verdict stands, scientific debate and free speech both fall
March 25, 2024
9 mins
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Times are getting harder for conservatives and classical liberals, who face challenges not only from the traditional social democratic Left but also from the new revolutionaries of wokeness. That hard going, it must said, can be laid at the feet of the centre-right itself, which too often fails to represent voters in the centre and on the right
January 19, 2024
9 mins
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When the entire world is looking nervously into the Abyss, […]
November 29, 2023
9 mins
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Constitutionalising your favoured political program, as Albanese & Co. attempted with the Voice, runs into the difficulty that it’s a high-profile public activity difficult to conceal and, when revealed, forcing its proponents into all kinds of undignified postures of denial and casuistry. To avoid those risks, Left progressives have come up with a more subtle and discreet method of evading democracy: namely, 'sortition'
November 23, 2023
8 mins
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The various legal assaults on Donald Trump, now the target of a gag order prohibiting almost any comment about the Georgia 'vote-fraud' prosecution, get the headlines. Less noticed but no less insidious is Democrat prosecutors' brazen misuse of the legal system to silence the speech of those whose opinions they disapprove
October 18, 2023
9 mins
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The Coutts documents show the bank lied in saying Nigel Farrage's account was closed for lack of funds. Its forty-page dossier, full of left-wing clichés and rumours, spoke of xenophobia, racism and reputational damage from being associated with BREXIT's chief advocate. So, with an arrogance unthinkable when banks focused on banking rather than activism, he was cast contempuously aside
September 19, 2023
9 mins
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Contrary to what the New York Times would have its readers believe, Trump did not 'denounce the rule of law' unless every indicted man who proclaims his innocence is held to be denouncing it. What he asserted, quite correctly, was that law enforcement had been hijacked by Democrats and their elected prosecutors to take out the most formidable opponent they face in next year’s presidential election, namely himself.
July 10, 2023
9 mins