"New Polity in Ohio" in the Winter 2025-6 edition of Salisbury Review magazine

                                               Saturday Night in Steubenville, 1950s

Downtown Steubenville, Ohio, not unlike the fictitious town in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), possessed all the admired attributes of American life in the first half of the twentieth century – public spirit, locally-owned shops, full employment, a rising middle-class, thriving local cultural scene and so on. Somewhere along the line, however, the American dream turned into a nightmare. Fourth Street precinct, the main thoroughfare in Old Steubenville, became a run-down, burnt-out parody of its previous self – the place you went to buy drugs or sex or get yourself killed when you were tired of life. There is, nevertheless, a revival going on in Fourth Street, a renewal that tells us a lot about a different kind of conservatism.

The Unreported Anti-Islamic Uprising in Iran

Here is the article for Quadrant Online. No subscription required to read it in its entirety: https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/middle-east/the-unreported-anti-islamic-uprising/

How the Left Became Anti-Semitic: First published in 2012

                   Quadrant Online republished this article of mine written 13 years ago

Follow the link: https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/from-our-archives/how-the-left-became-anti-semitic/

Two Charlies and the Sin of Provocation - Quadrant, December 2025

Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, accused the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo of committing the sin of provocation when fifteen of the journal’s staff were slaughtered by two young Algerian Muslims on January 7, 2015. Hateful cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, or so the narrative went, triggered the murders. Tyler Robinson, a decade later, was provoked but by a different Charlie. This assassin, too, felt he had no alternative but to perform what we might call – stretching the customary definition – an “honour killing”. Erdoğan and the “yes…but” apologists for the assassination of Charlie Kirk share a rejection of Western-derived modernity. That is to say, the sovereignty of the individual. The ideologies of Wokeism and Islamism are different manifestations of the same cultish tribalism: the negative cohesion connecting the two is a rejection of freedom-of-expression absolutism under the pretext of the sin of provocation.

Free the World of Hamas

 

Here is a link to my latest piece for Spectator Australia: https://www.spectator.com.au/2025/10/free-the-world-of-hamas/

The Bifurcation of the World

Here is my piece for the October 2025 edition of Quadrant magazine: https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/foreign-affairs/the-bifurcation-of-the-world/

Modi Tries His Hand At Poker

A recent article for Spectator Australia: https://www.spectator.com.au/2025/09/modi-tries-his-hand-at-poker/