Moral Courage
Charlie Kirk’s death is tragedy enough. The mockery that followed threatens something larger: the very foundation of pluralism and the principle without which democracy cannot endure — that human beings are ends, never means.
Freedom
Charlie Kirk refused the bargain of silence. Where we traded conviction for comfort, he spoke with courage. His voice broke the hush of conformity and left us with a charge: to find our own voices, and to remember that freedom lives only when defended.
Freedom
Compassion, rightly lived, is suffering-with, bound to truth and responsibility. But false compassion—sentiment without judgment—becomes spectacle: pity that flatters, politics that infantilize, care that corrodes freedom.
Freedom
Populism, wrote Christopher Lasch, is less a doctrine than a rebellion of the scorned. Trump’s rise was not ideology but interruption: a voice for the forgotten, exposing brittle elites and forcing America to confront its distance from its own people.
Freedom
Ezra Klein’s NYT column turns politics into dystopian theater. Mafias, golden offices, alarms of “authoritarianism” abound — yet without definition. As MacIntyre foresaw, words survive as fragments, stripped of meaning, leaving rhetoric where judgment should be.
Breaking with Marx
From Leo XIII to John Paul II, the Church has stood with the poor—yet never by confusing justice with class struggle or dignity with enforced equality. Its vision affirms persons, not classes: for the poor, yes; for Marx, no.
Freedom
Augustine’s “city of pilgrims” and Oakeshott’s “resident strangers” remind us: democracy is no utopia, but a fragile order of wayfarers. Its strength lies not in perfection, but in patience, compromise, and trust.
Moral Courage
The Left’s pursuit of justice is noble—but without humility, it curdles into dogma. Democracy rests on fallibility and compromise. To recover humility is not weakness but the renewal of pluralism itself.
Conscience
Amid ruins and censors, Rublev painted communion. Tarkovsky filmed his silence. Across centuries, both remind us: beauty does not erase suffering, but transfigures it—conscience’s last word against power.
Conscience
Friendship severed over politics is not just private pain but civic fragility. When ties yield to ideology, plurality—the essence of democracy—erodes. To stay friends across difference is not weakness but the hardest defense of freedom.
Foreign Affairs
The UN is no world government—and that is its virtue. Its inertia slows war, its discord blocks monopoly, and its stage lets rivals quarrel without empire. Flawed and fragile, it preserves what liberty most requires: prudence, time, and knowledge.
Conscience
◳ In an age of extremes, Camus’s philosophy of revolt with restraint challenges both nihilism and authoritarianism, reminding us that true rebellion affirms dignity without abandoning conscience. We live in an age where moderation is mocked. Every debate is framed as an existential showdown, every election as a battle between