2025 marks the 75th year since the inception of the Schuman Plan. It was said that Schuman “didn’t really understand the treaty which bore his name.” Indeed, this is the intended strategy of architects of Euro-federalism: make the structural process so byzantine that few, especially the population at large, can understand what is happening. Technocracy, rather than democracy, is the project’s driving force.

Today’s iconoclasts seek little more than a photograph in the newspaper, if not a prison sentence—think of the media-ready antics of Just Stop Oil, throwing soup on Van Gogh or spraying Stonehenge with orange paint. Any attention they might lend to their cause is smothered in a self-serving narcissistic love of the image of themselves performing destruction.

Molnar recognizes that the fundamental questions of political philosophy have remained the same since Plato: Whence does power come? Who holds it? And on what basis?

We are a strange people, we descendants of the 17th and 18th century French pioneers in North America.

The Flemish expressionists provide an example of reconciling tradition and experiment.

Seasonal festivals have disappeared because modern man’s experience of food is tied to the supermarket.

Reading Javier Marías’ Berta Isla, I’d finally escaped my hospital bed and entered into a terrain where needles and IVs weren’t welcome.

We must fight to save education in the West. But what, precisely, is the education we wish to save?

Anyone whose activity is a relief to the public purse should be entitled to a reduction of his own contribution to it.

Becoming Christmas is living in the knowledge, as St. John writes, that “as he is, so also are we in this world.”

Check out the new podcast and Substack about finding transcendence in the pulpy medium of comics.

In each imperial or royal court—as well as in that of the popes—Christmas and its Twelve Days were a major celebration.