The Weekly Sanfedisti

     There has been a silent shift among Catholics and maybe even conservatives more broadly on the question of the death penalty. While the death penalty had been a contentious issue in the 70s and 80s with Michael Dukakis having sunk his campaign with not answering YES! unequivocally when asked in a debate on whether he would favor its use in the circumstance of his wife being raped and killed, and then saying that that's why grieving family members shouldn't be in charge of the legal system. The Death Penalty is now one of those supplementary issues ranking somewhere between nuclear arms reduction and environmental conservation, all important issues yes, but issues that have fallen away from the public consciousness.        I have found, however, that there is a new talk of the death penalty less of an actual debate about the issue itself but more of a supplementary rhetorical device when someone is debating abortion. A progressive might say t...

     The year is 2013. I had up to that point in my life never considered myself an avid video gamer, sure I would buy the yearly installments of FIFA like a good little boy and sprinkle in a WWE game or something but I was never the type to actively invested in a video game. That all changed when I happened upon my crush playing Dragon Age 2, so I had the brilliant idea of learning everything I could about this game in a juvenile way to impress her. So I started from scratch playing Dragon Age: Origins, and then you could say that was the beginning of my life. I played it, and devoured it like a starving man wanting food, moved on to Dragon Age 2 was a bit let down but that was ok because the new game was right around the corner in just.... a year. I distinctly remember googling "how many days till Nov 18 2014?" about 40 or 50 times, it wasn't an exaggeration to say this game mattered more to me than life itself. When I finally got my hands on the game (deluxe edition), ...

       I thought as a fun exercise, I would put out there some policy ideas and a brief summary.  Brezhnev-style housing - Have the government build a few hundred thousand of these eye-sore apartment blocks, it doesn't have to be pretty but there is immediate need for an alleviation of the housing crisis and this would provide immediate relief for millions of people in need of homes. This could also be coupled with a law declaring that no individual or company can legally declare ownership of more than two private residences which would strike a lethal blow to the heart of parasitic landlordism.  Food Stamps Reform - Limiting what could be used on a Food Stamps card to fresh fruits and vegetables, canned foods and cereal will go a long way towards reducing the obesity crisis in this country especially child obesity. Welfare has been wildly abused and has become nothing more than an indirect subsidy to the Frito-Lay and Coca-Cola companies. There s...

    A month has passed since the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the last remaining great leaders of the 20th century. In what was a predictable scene reactions were mostly muted in Russia while in the west there was a mourning of the "great reformer" the man who ended the Cold War. I didn't really know what to make of this phenomenon, is this the most base kind of cynicism I wondered, to celebrate a politician so corrosive to an adversary that it caused them to collapse. Would it be like France sending a wreath to the funeral of Henry VI to honor such an own-goal of a king. But then it occurred to me that it might not be cynicism but an extreme form of naivete among the press, in the belief that of course liberal democracy must be so correct and true that Gorbachev was a crypto-liberal that was some sort of Buddha who nobly sacrificed his own nation to save the world from Marxism and as thus is one for humanity.      I suppose the later view is somethin...

    Be warned that to be a Jacobite is a lonely existence, there are no jubilees or the commemorative merchandise that characterizes monarchies in the 21st century. There is but only a wistfulness to what might have been and a tiny hope that the true cause might be fulfilled. A good question to start with would be "What does a Jacobite believe in?", to put it simply we are monarchists generally from the anglosphere and paradoxically at least a plurality seem to be American although no in depth study has ever been concluded. What separates us is that we hold that in 1688 in the so called "Glorious Revolution" James II the king of England, was illegally overthrown by the Parliament and usurped by his daughter and son in law, also illegally. And because Parliament has no right to dethrone a reigning monarch, James II and his heirs are the true sovereigns of England, Scotland and Ireland. This also means by extension that the line of rulers since this usurpation is ille...

      On my second re-watch of the brilliant HBO miniseries "John Adams" one can see many of the proto-arguments that dominate the politics of today, whether that be the debate on the role of the States vis a vis the Federal Government or the role of government censorship. It's a nostalgic continuity that grounds viewers in two points, first that the republic is an extremely young one, and secondly, that they and us are not so different, the show takes place after all in the time of the grandparents of our grandparents grandparents, which is a blink compared to any considerable stretch in history. But there was a certain scene which stuck out as utterly foreign to my modern ears, an exchange between Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the titular John Adams in which Franklin argues that for the republic to survive it requires virtue and virtuous citizens.     The concept of virtue was one in vogue in the time of the enlightenment, drawing from the ancient ro...

      In recent weeks there has been a confluence of multiple events that previously would have been been the events that defined decades. A shooting at an elementary school of which its only comparable antecedent Sandy Hook still sticks in the minds of millions among dozens of other notable mass shootings. An ongoing publicized House committee investigating the involvement of a former President in what was at best an unruly mob trespassing on the hallowed ground of the Capitol building, the epicenter of our Republic, and at worst a calculated attempt to overthrow that very Republic. And most of all the monumental decision by the Supreme Court to reverse the almost 50-year decision of Roe v. Wade and upend the status quo on abortion.      All of these events in years past would have dramatically shepherded the moderate center of our country into the arms of the Democrats. But to the contrary, generic congressional polling has shown a consistent lead fo...