By Jonathon Van Maren Many may not recognize his name, but like Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message” has entered the mainstream consciousness as a term that captures our times. I was first exposed to McLuhan in university, when one of my professors insisted that we…
In “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama,” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow successfully upends the entire narrative of Obama’s life, calling his memoirs “historical fiction” and explaining, through hundreds of interviews, how Obama created a narrative in order to win political power. He joined Jonathon Van Maren to discuss that fascinating story.
By Jonathon Van Maren So Pride Month has come again to Canada, when drag queens and nudists prance the streets and any politician who might find himself not entirely in lockstep with the LGBTQ Alphabet Soup crowd—or perhaps simply doesn’t care for scenes of public indecency—finds himself relentlessly harassed by the Media McCarthyites with strident…
By Jonathon Van Maren If I happen to be in a certain state of mind, scrolling through my Twitter feed is pretty terrible for my blood pressure. The progressives are no longer at war with conservatives, or even with traditionalists—they are at war with biological reality, history, and truth itself. Just to give you an…
By Jonathon Van Maren In Anthony Esolen’s recent book Out of the Ashes, he mourns the passing—and heralds the return—of a time when communities existed—real communities, where the baker came outside each morning and helped children across the street for school even though no one had ever asked him to, when people trusted each other,…
By Jonathon Van Maren As many of you will know, I have been following the progress of Motion 47, which had the Canadian Standing Committee on Health examining the impact of pornography on sexual violence and on society in general. With over 80% of men regularly consuming pornography and now nearly half of women, it…
By Jonathon Van Maren In his review of my book The Culture War, which traces our culture’s descent from the Greatest Generation to the Millennial Snowflake Blizzard, lawyer Andre Schutten noted that he hoped I’d turn my last chapter on the way forward into an entirely separate book that looked more closely at how Christians…
By Jonathon Van Maren Ever since Margaret Atwood’s novel A Handmaid’s Tale has been turned into a much-acclaimed TV miniseries depicting a dystopia run by “Christians” who obviously know nothing about Christianity (which doesn’t get noticed, because TV critics know nothing about Christianity, either), Canadian literature has suddenly been a far hotter topic than usual.…
By Jonathon Van Maren It’s happened again—this time on the London Bridge, an English icon. Terrorists smashed a white van into a crowd of people, and then emerged with 12-inch long hunting knives and began to stab people. There were also stabbings near Borough Market, and three suspects are still at large. This is all…
By Jonathon Van Maren Neil Macdonald, one of those smug, elitist drones bestowed upon us by our government-funded state broadcaster to tell us what’s best for us, has just written a column that should win scores of awards in the categories of cluelessness and snottiness. Macdonald, who happens to be the brother of the far more…