Patrick Keeney is as smartphone-enslaved as the rest of us, but he’s more worried about it than most. Not for himself, but for civil society and democracy. Keeney sees modern digital communications technologies as exacerbating many of the most pernicious social trends of our time: mistrust of elites, rejection of family and community, and “hyper-individualism”. The messages conveyed by new digital mediums are mostly post-modern and progressive, which is not how anyone would describe New England Patriots’ coach and Super Bowl champion Bill Belichick. So it gave Keeney hope when he heard Belichick growl: “I’m not on SnapFace.”

The University of Chicago’s English Department recently announced it is only accepting new graduate students if they intend to “work in or with” Black Studies. Patrick Keeney’s review of Unsafe Space: The Crisis of Free Speech on Campus charts how political correctness is eroding the university mission of methodical discovery and the teaching of truths.

Two pre-humans are shivering in a cave. On hearing a nearby lightning strike, one rushes outside to fetch a flaming faggot of wood ignited by the lightning. The other, fearing an existential threat to life, rushes to extinguish the fire. It was the first argument over global warming. People have been fretting over many such real and imagined threats to the planet ever since. Climate change, Y2K, flu pandemics, Clinton/Obama foreign policy. You name it, it’s an apocalyptic menace. Patrick Keeney is tired of it, and has concluded that news of Armageddon is greatly exaggerated.

Regular C2C Journal contributor Mark Milke recently lamented the demise of the “Calgary School” of classical liberal academics who once dominated the political science department at the University of Calgary. They were a rare source of philosophical diversity in a Canadian academic world dominated by progressives. But there are others like them, including some of their protégés, and a dozen have contributed to a new collection of essays espousing classical liberalism as essential to civic education and democracy. Patrick Keeney reviews Liberal Education, Civic Education, and the Canadian Regime.

The U.S. education system has been hijacked by cultural vandals who have dismantled its core purpose of intergenerational transfer of cultural values, creating a nation without a unity narrative.

Jessica Yaniv, the self-described B.C. transgender activist, was in the news again recently, the RCMP searching her Langley, B.C. apartment after she brandished a prohibited weapon during an online debate. Yaniv, you may recall, is seeking redress from the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal after more than a dozen female aestheticians refused to perform a Brazilian Wax on her (his?] male genitalia. Yaniv’s claim appears preposterous. Yet as Patrick Keeney explains in this thoughtful essay, framing public morality exclusively in terms of human rights ushers in a certain logic, one which suppresses personal responsibility and allows any human desire to be transformed into a moral claim.

Perhaps befitting the leader of a party hunting middle-of-the-road votes, Justin Trudeau avoids ideology in his rhetoric and his platform. That’s for the other guys, the “extremists” to his left and right, who are so driven by partisan dogma that it blinds them to the virtues of “evidence-based” public policy. Promising to rely on experts and “hard, scientific data” may help Trudeau overcome doubts about his competence to be prime minister. But most voters want to know what their leaders believe in, writes Patrick Keeney, and the risk for Trudeau is that they will conclude he believes in nothing.

For many decades Canadian politics have maintained a sort of triangulated equilibrium featuring two centrist parties regularly swapping power while a centre-left party languished in opposition, occasionally holding the balance of power. Recent history suggests, however, that our democracy is edging towards a sharper left-right competition between “conservatives” and “progressives”. Patrick Keeney examines the origins of this divide in his review of The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and The Birth of Right and Left.

Everyone agrees the Charlie Hebdo satirists did not deserve to be murdered for ridiculing Islamist extremism. But as the frequency of terrorist attacks in western countries increases, everyone also agrees we must address the radicalization that is causing so much political violence in the name of Allah. Patrick Keeney writes that free expression must not be constrained in examining the connection between the Islamic religion and Islamist terror: Peter Stockland argues that a less confrontational approach focussed on Islamist ideology, rather than the Islamic religion, is less likely to provoke more radicalization and violence.

Artificial intelligence could bring about a totalitarian world state, largely by proscribing unpopular speech and eroding our ability to determine what is true. John Carpay and Michael Kennedy cast a gimlet eye at the suppression of contrarian ideas on campus and call for a cultural shift to remind Canadians why free speech matters.