Johnson lifted talking points from the wokesters’ playbook, calling Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “a perfect example of toxic masculinity” and urging the world to install “more women in positions of power.”
Opinions will always differ on what best approximates the common good and on the utility of law as an agent of virtue in any particular case. But to imitate the liberal silence on such crucial questions is to invite radical neo-Marxists to answer them for us.
Activist lecturers like this belong to a small minority of people within Britain, but it is worth going through her fierce assault on the recent Platinum Jubilee, if for no other reason than to expose the hostile activism that now passes for teaching at our publicly funded universities.
The real test of Johnson’s odds of political survival will be whether he gets a higher or lower percentage of the Tory votes than his predecessor did in 2018.
Liberal thinkers have fetishized their false image of the rule of law as a commitment to neutrality. The idea has become such a sacred article of the liberal faith, that any effort to draw upon our Judeo-Christian heritage is condemned as tyranny.
The resonant echoes of our island story in public rituals, though a little pantomime-ish, reconnect us to our past. They help us feel the burden of our role as custodians of a national inheritance, so that Britain’s most precious features, while subject to repair and improvement where possible, are carried to future generations. In this sense, a country’s rituals are a sign of respect for the past, not blind deference to its every jot and tittle.
Francis Bacon was the talisman of Renaissance science, producing an inductive philosophy which he advanced with all the zeal of a religious convert. But as far as he was concerned, promoting such methods required no actual conversion from the Christian beliefs which prevailed in his day.
Particularly in Britain, the New Culture Forum’s film is likely to evoke plaintive sentiments, if not downright fury. Indeed, the UK Conservative government has altogether less to show for itself than the Hungarians do after an equivalent period of now twelve years in Downing Street.
After an MP had just been murdered in cold blood, and without evidence that social media played any role in causing the heinous act, the spectacle of MPs wasting parliamentary time with irrelevant distractions was a shameful scandal. For how much longer will the political class flee from reality rather than face unpleasant facts?
Nobody could escape the merciless nature of Waugh’s satirical wit, but he was more than a mere humourist. Alongside his gift for comedy, he also possessed an awareness of a fateful void in the modern world.
