Living With Big Brother

By |2021-11-10T16:23:10-06:00November 10th, 2021|Categories: Catholicism, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors, Tyranny|

Georg Ratzinger in his childhood and youth had seen and experienced the consequences of secular fundamentalism at first hand. He was all too aware that there is precious little difference between the various shades of socialism. Big Brother, by any other name, is an enemy of freedom. On August 21, 2008, Pope Benedict described his [...]

Hell Is Getting What You Want

By |2021-04-06T13:05:36-05:00April 10th, 2021|Categories: Freedom, Tyranny|

Just as all men recognize tyranny as the most oppressive regime, we should recognize a tyrannical soul as the most onerous. The tyrannical soul gets exactly what it wants, but this is a curse, not a blessing. Freedom from all constraint is actually the worst form of slavery. “A dream is a wish your heart [...]

Critiquing Robert Kagan’s Enlightenment Liberalism

By |2019-10-30T12:06:44-05:00May 6th, 2019|Categories: Conservatism, Democracy, Donald Trump, Liberalism, Natural Rights Tradition, Politics, Tyranny|

While Robert Kagan basically dismisses church and community in the development of liberalism, can there be any sadder but more important concession than his own admission that “liberalism has no particular answer” for what can legitimize its rights? An essay is meant to be very, very important when it consumes four giant pages in the [...]

Facebook Fascism and the Slippery Slope to Tyranny

By |2019-04-14T21:56:59-05:00April 14th, 2019|Categories: Fascism, Free Speech, Joseph Pearce, Modernity, Rights, Senior Contributors, Tyranny|

Following the recent attack on a mosque in New Zealand by a white supremacist terrorist, I was asked by a national TV network in the UK to appear on a live show to give my perspective as a former white supremacist. (I served two prison sentences for “inciting racial hatred” back in the 1980s.) I [...]

Manifest Destiny and the American Nimrods

By |2021-04-22T18:28:33-05:00November 30th, 2018|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Bradley J. Birzer, History, Nationalism, Politics, Revolution, Social Order, Tyranny|

By the beginning of the Mexican war, even famed newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan began to doubt his own expansionist infatuations. What would America do, for example, if she tried to incorporate not just Mexico but actual, honest-to-God Mexicans into the republic? Standing with his father as they watched the Battle of Bunker Hill in [...]

The Saudi Crown Prince Starring in the Role of Henry II

By |2024-03-15T16:42:30-05:00October 21st, 2018|Categories: Ethics, Joseph Mussomeli, Journalism, Middle East, Monarchy, Politics, Tyranny|

We have all seen the scene at least once, although some of us have savored it perhaps dozens of times. The handsome, dynamic, misunderstood, modernizing young king, with his slender physique, slender beard, and even more slender morals, strutting about the banquet hall knocking the plates and goblets off the table in a drunken frenzy. [...]

Can Only a God Save Us Now?

By |2017-07-24T16:46:33-05:00July 24th, 2017|Categories: Christianity, Culture, Culture War, Democracy, Modernity, Morality, Politics, Socialism, Tyranny, Western Civilization|

Western civilization has been gutted from within. At the core of this moral bankruptcy is a watered-down Christianity that lacks the conviction to defend itself… Today mankind enjoys unprecedented technology, but lacks the wisdom to regard technology as a tool in the service of life, and not an end in itself. The difference between the [...]

The Tyrant’s Unexamined Soul

By |2023-04-14T11:22:17-05:00April 8th, 2017|Categories: Featured, Fr. James Schall, Plato, Socrates, Tyranny|

Tyrants—intelligent, charming men as they usually are—rush into politics without first examining their souls. Politics without wisdom is not politics. A recurring theme in Plato’s dialogues, including his Seventh Letter, describes the education of a young man who wants to achieve the highest things, which he considers to be achieved primarily through his ruling the [...]

Is Barack Obama Our Worst President?

By |2017-07-31T23:48:04-05:00January 17th, 2017|Categories: Barack Obama, Fr. James Schall, Politics, Presidency, Tyranny|

President Obama’s Muslim and community-organizing backgrounds were both traditions that had almost nothing to do with what we once understood to be Western civilization, with its unique American gloss… In the sweepstakes for which of our presidents was the worst, the usual candidates are James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Warren Harding. When William Jefferson Clinton [...]

Remembering Alexis de Tocqueville

By |2022-02-23T10:14:59-06:00January 15th, 2017|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy, Democracy in America, Featured, Timeless Essays, Tyranny|

The rule of democratic tyranny, Tocqueville held, “reduces each nation to nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd”… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Patrick Deneen as he traces Alexis de Tocqueville’s argument concerning the American tendency towards majoritarianism [...]

The Tyranny of Tenderness

By |2016-09-03T21:56:24-05:00September 3rd, 2016|Categories: Abortion, Christianity, Culture, Culture War, Dwight Longenecker, Homosexual Unions, Tyranny|

Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor agreed that “tenderness leads to the gas chambers,” and what they were trying to get through our thick heads is that tenderness without truth is tyranny. As Rodney Stark has pointed out in The Rise of Christianity, the Roman Empire was a harsh, unforgiving, cruel, and relentless society in which [...]

Is Totalitarian Liberalism a Mutant Form of Christianity?

By |2022-03-31T18:09:52-05:00May 22nd, 2016|Categories: Catholicism, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Communio, Pope Benedict XVI, Timeless Essays, Tracey Rowland, Tyranny, Western Civilization|

Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Tracey Rowland as she examines the dangers to the family if political leaders are allowed to act as God. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher When the Obama Administration began its Kulturkampf against American Catholics, my husband suggested to me that if the [...]

Plato’s Tale of the Wolf-Tyrant: A Lesson for Our Times?

By |2016-05-14T10:50:44-05:00April 6th, 2016|Categories: Christopher Morrissey, Democracy, Featured, Plato, Socrates, Tyranny|

How can the wealthiest people make democracies worse? Plato investigates the question in Book VIII of the Republic. Socrates suggests there that, in pursuit of more and more wealth, oligarchic citizens within the democracy will exploit the lower economic classes, even to the point of undermining their own oligarchic economic interests. In other words, the [...]

Slouching Towards Tyranny: Why America Needs God

By |2016-08-28T09:22:01-05:00April 1st, 2016|Categories: Christianity, Government, Leadership, Politics, Sainthood, Tyranny, Wyoming Catholic College|

In the fifth century B.C., Athens and her allies were at war with Sparta and her allies in the Peloponnesian War, made famous by the great historian Thucydides. In the first part of the war, Pericles, son of Xanthippus, was the leader of Athens; by all accounts, he was an able leader, not least because [...]

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