Featured writing
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China's hidden genocide
May 7 2021
An examination of the theological roots of the Chinese Communist Party’s decades-long war on the Falun Dafa spiritual discipline, and why it has escape the notice of Western elites: “For the same reasons it was seen as antithetical to Marxist-materialism in China, [Falun Dafa’s] cosmology and traditionalist moral teachings must be viewed as deviant according to the secular, modernizing aims of progressivism.”
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They Can't Cancel Your Soul
April 26 2021
“No matter the extremes of persecution that leave you feeling rootless and without a home in the world, take it as a reminder that there is a world elsewhere—an abiding home to which you can always return, as long as you seek it. And if your suffering should seem long, or if you’ve failed sometimes to meet it with courage and equanimity, be glad: you still have time to shore up for yourself the incorruptible spiritual treasures, which will endure.”
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Apologia
April 5, 2019
A four-part contemporaneous account of my 2019 run for political office and subsequent public ‘cancelation’; this is the bizarre true story that didn’t make it to print. Towards the end, it evolves into meditation on the world we want, and the ways in which we can inoculate ourselves against spiritual and philosophic disorder.
Podcast & interviews
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Girlboss, Interrupted
A conversation with Helen Roy about the necessity and value of suffering; education; mortality and natality; Chinese totalitarianism and cultural revolutions; the consequences of the purported death of God; and loss of transcendent sources of meaning. With an obligatory account of Eric Voegelin’s conception of modern gnosticism.
Listen Here on “Girlboss, Interrupted”
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Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power
A conversation with Peter Stockland where I relate my experience of cancel culture to Plato’s Gorgias dialogue, Josef Pieper’s “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power,” and the importance of calling things by their proper names. This interview also discuses Rene Girard, and how new technologies increase the risk of negative mimetic escalation.
Listen Here on Word Work
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Conversation with Cass Sunstein
Discussion with Harvard University Law Professor and prolific author Cass Sunstein on public shaming campaigns. We discuss the social and psychological factors that compel people to participate in these modern ‘lapidations’, including a desire to signal in-group solidarity, compensate for a perceived loss of social or political agency, seek moral validation, or bring about a transformation of social norms.
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In defense of reality
One of the stranger conversations I’ve had in a ‘public’ forum — and it’s a high bar. This conversation is about the existence of an objective reality, which is apprehensible through human reason and intuition, and which includes moral laws. Also: sex difference, space travel, transhumanism, machine logic, covid, biological limitations, and the need to keep humanity human.
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The Conflict on the Right
In a moderated discussion with Queens University law professor and defender of classical liberalism Bruce Pardy, I take up the post-liberal position and argue for the restoration of coherent moral categories in public life. I argue that the rise of “wokeness” and the erosion of civil liberties is not due to a failure of liberal philosophical commitments, but to their triumph.
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Consolations of philosophy
In an interview with John Kass, I discuss my experience of cancelation, and how public shaming and de-platforming campaigns exert a chilling effect on free inquiry and lead to a breakdown of social trust and openness. Also, the consolations that be drawn from reading the literature and philosophy of some of history’s great exiles.
Listen on the Chicago Way (begin at 25:30)
Recent writing
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The false metaphysics of progressive education
Jan 11 2023
“Every approach to education is underpinned by a set of highly consequential metaphysical and anthropological ideas about the nature of reality and man’s place in it. It’s at this level that modern education went awry, and if we want to return it to its proper ends, we have to begin with first principles.”
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Our national public broadcaster should create culture, not commodities
June 13 2022
There is a vital role for public patronage of the arts, and for a national public broadcaster that defies the spirit of the age and the liquifying forces of the marketplace. The CBC has abdicated that responsibility; it neglects the duty that cultural institutions have not just to reflect, but to shape culture, by either upholding or undermining its foundations.
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It's time to give infants the vote
December 13 2021
“For those of us not destined for sainthood, infamy, or literary greatness, having children is our best shot at immortality. As the philosopher Leon Kass writes, children provide “an opening to the future beyond the grave,” and a means of overcoming the finitude of perishable human existence…A culture that does not want children is, in some sense, one that has ceased to hope. It has either forgotten or repudiated its past, and so has no sense of obligation to the future.”
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The horrible miracle of Justin of Papinneau
February 24 2022
A Rene Girard-inspired essay on Justin Trudeau, plagues, truckers, and the false “miracle” of scapegoating as a means of purchasing social peace. The title derives from the story of Apollonius of Tyana, who is recorded as having healed a plague in the ancient city of Ephesus by initiating the stoning death of an innocent beggar.
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‘It’s hard to describe the pain’: Interview with an Olympic prisoner
February 10 2022
“Every day we had to sing songs together glorifying the Communist Party. If you refused, you would be shocked with the electric baton. During the Olympic Games, they told us to sing the theme song “Beijing Welcomes You.” We refused. The guards asked, “Are you not proud that China is hosting the Olympic Games? Are you not patriotic?” But how could we feel proud? We were imprisoned illegally because of these Olympics.”
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They Can't Cancel Your Soul
April 26 2021“Fortune can take away your friends and your property. It can rob you of your health and leave you soaked in slander. But nothing that happens to us can make us less virtuous, or just, or temperate, or kind—not unless we allow ourselves to be changed for the worse.”